Journal entry 2

This is the first devlog after putting together a somewhat playable game.  

List of new additions:

• Level design
• Scoring
• Events tied to scoring AND movement¨
• Respawn upon falling off the map

On Level design:
The first decision I made was to completely do away with the map draft of the One-page design. The core idea remains, but keeping the map closed to a single central branch with small direct paths goes against the idea of finding optimal paths. What I ended up after a surprisingly long amount of time was semi-circular arena split into two parts. The first part is a medium-sized blob of small, but claustrophobic clumps of platforms. The placements can be frustrating, but after a bit of fiddling and giving it some thought, I scrapped the name of "bug" and replaced it with "feature". The tightly-packed floating islands as well as their jagged nature serve to encourage faster, improvised jumps while their proximity puts more focus on quick maneuvering, rather than precision jumping, which can admittedly feel awkward with how tall the player character is. Nonetheless, there seems to be just enough leeway in the jumping for it to be acceptable. 

The level itself is filled with unmoving platforms that are ready to start moving once the appropriate buttons are hit. The only way of knowing which buttons trigger what is having learned it in a past playthrough, making further space for planning of routes and getting better times.

The last part of the level hides the end goal which can be taken at any moment, along with a number of buttons increasing the player's score on tight platforms. The second section is also high above the first stage, making any fall or traversing of the gap a crucial time-saver, as well as raising the skill ceiling.

Scoring:
The exact ratio of time to points in the final score is yet to be determined, but the target object is counting all of the individual presses as well as the elspsed time since start. It is being printed into the debug console at the moment.

Player no longer falls off the map indefinitely

Encountered bugs: 
I encountered some really unreasonable errors that happened to magically solve themselves once enough time passed, making me lose several hours of development.

Plans:

The game is nearly finished, due to the achievable humbleness of the design, which I now appreciate a lot more than at the start. The only things the game is actively missing are an end menu with properly displayed elements and remembering the high score, at least before the game is quit entirely. Whether I can achieve it before the next lesson is uncertain, seeing as some really important tests are around the corner at the moment.

The time: The specific time spent is unknown to me at the moment since I took breaks for other duties at uneven intervals, but most of the day was spent on development, certainly surpassing 4 hours.