Grapple Gliders - Sprint 4

    This sprint's work went surprisingly smoothly. Since there were only two of us this time, we had to do some more tasks, but we were able to delegate them easier because there's only two ways to separate them: code stuff and make levels. My lead is much better at coding than I am, so I was in charge of making the levels. I was able to make 3 levels, a tutorial level and 2 actual gameplay levels.

    There were a few things to consider when it came to making levels. First, how big the level would be. I definitely didn't want it to be small so as there's no space to move, but not too big that there's a lot of meaningless space. It seems like I've gotten the size down, since no one commented on that in the playtest. Although, I think the levels should be a bit wider so players can take a slightly less straight route to the goal. Another thing that I wanted to keep in mind when making levels is that most of the stuff in the level should be below the goal, because it's a watchtower. A watchtower isn't much of anything when it’s covered by things after all. The problem with this is that the gliding mechanic doesn’t really get used. You can only ever go down with it and the grapple mechanic ends up being a better way to move forward in the level.

Side View of Level 1
    In the second level, I included some hoop poles with a coin in the hoop so that ideally, players would glide through them, but during playtest, players just grappled onto them and went through the hoop.
A Front View of Level 2

One thing I was aware of was that my levels didn’t have a lot of objects in the lower area of the level, so if you fall of a platform, you kind of have to annoyingly climb up a tree or walk to a platform you can grapple to and swing yourself to a platform with the momentum. (See the Level 1 screenshot.) I was worried that putting too many platforms in the lower area would make the player only jump everywhere and not use the mechanics of our prototype. So before sprint end, I added in a few more to each one. There probably still needs to be some more anyways.

    When making the levels, I really wanted to get some playtest data before I called it finished because I wasn’t sure if I even made it fun yet. Luckily, many of the playtesters liked it, with the suggestion that it just needs more polish. The grappling range felt small, which made sense because I didn’t want players slingshotting themselves really high or forward and then skipping everything. But luckily that didn’t seem to be a problem. The results fell within my predictions. Unfortunately, only 2 people submitted a response to our form, even though I made sure to tell more than one playtester to go do it when they got the chance. I suppose next time we will have to force them to do the form right after the playtest, even if they don't have a lot of time.

    The tutorial level was much easier to create, but it makes sense since I did work on it after I made the gameplay levels. There’s ample space between each platform, and to get to the goal, you need to use the grapple pickup. I made it smaller than the gameplay ones because there isn’t too much to interact with here, just pickups for the mechanics, trees to grapple to, and the goal. For the gameplay levels, there’s a ground that is under the whole level, but for the tutorial I did away with that so that you can’t just walk to the next area and not use the mechanic that the tutorial is trying to teach you. I might make the space between the glide platform and the platform you get the grapple pickup a bit wider since you don’t really need to glide, you can use the triple jump.

Tutorial Level
    Currently, I’m mainly just working on refining the levels from this sprint. I would say the first level is mostly done but the second level still needs work. I would like to work on a new level that focuses more on the gliding mechanic, but the ones we have right now take more precedent. Our backlog is pretty much cleared, except for one card that’s more of a wish than a need, so we can safely cut it out.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this sprint turned out, and I hope we can do well in the next one.

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