Lost Echo’s Preview 45 – Expanding the Console

Lost Echo’s Preview 45

For the third week of March, I continued expanding the game console that I was working on from last week. I added in the mechanics for swapping out the game canisters physically in the main game. I also added in frame work for lives, soft resets on death death, and added in additional enemies in Sugar Dynasties.

Shelves and Game Canisters

Originally I was planning to use the shelf below the game console to hold the games, but when I was testing out the models in both Blender and Godot, I quickly realized that the canisters were going to be too big for that area, and that I wouldn’t be able to cleanly look at and select objects in that area. So I created too shelves on either side of the Television. One for the Game canisters, and one for if / when I add in the music canisters.

In the Spirit Tamer universe, there was a slight tech reset. Even though there are Molecular Fabricators in Universe, the types of things that could be fabricated were restricted. Canisters were adopted in time for both music (I.e. grooves indented into vinyl cylinders) and eventually continued out into other data devices. These kinds of things are technically feasible with today’s tech, but would be pretty costly to manufacture.

Expanding Sugar Dynasties

For sugar dynasties, I work on improving the gumdrops the player collects by making them bigger. The previous version I felt like they were too small especially when seeing it game.

I also added in the base object for the power ups. The code’s there to differentiate between the gumdrops and power ups, but haven’t added in the special event to handle what happens.

Then I added the framework for lives, keeping track of player and enemy position at the start of the level. On death there is a soft reset where player and enemies are reset, but collected items remain collected.

After that I added in additional levels, and a new enemy type. The first level represents the Sugar kingdom, and the second level represents the frosty kingdom, where the player will run into evil ice cream men. There’s only two, and they walk really slow, but they’re pretty much snipers when they throw their snowballs.

Extending Hidden Systems

I also took the time to expand some more of the hidden systems in the game. Still debating how much I want to reveal about it, because of both spoilers, and because it’s just hard to show.

I’ve found trying to design the whole system all at once can be a bit over whelming. Like trying to figure out how to abstract the main menu, central game and victory screen to multiple kinds of games at once can leave me in a bit of a stun lock and have me writing out a few pages of designs and considerations. While that might be good long term, short term it doesn’t really accomplish much.

So it’s better to break it down, and test out the ideas iteratively. Like designing the main menu for one game, one level, etc, and then slowly iterating outward and abstracting similar functions, and expanding it to work with multiple things. I hope that makes sense?