Whilst everyone has been outside enjoying the unusually warm October, we've been busily working on some level design ideas for Gloop Troops 2. At the moment we're playing around the idea of multi-screen levels. We wanted to expand a bit more on the levels of Gloop Troops but are unsure on what the best implementation for GT2 will be.
The ideas currently floating around are:
- Allow levels to be made up of multiple screens, with the player freely able to travel between them.
- Have multiple screens make up a level, but you only access the next screen once you've completed the current screen.
- Keep with the original design and only have single screen levels.
Each idea seems to have some interesting pros and cons. The first idea makes the game feel much more open and gives some interesting level design space as now each level is 3 or 4 screens in length. We could either have a selection of pickups that you need to collect in order to finish the level, or have a single pickup that you need to find in order to complete the level. The multiple screens and freedom of movement makes the game feel quite different to it's tighter arcade parent. You no longer feel as constrained in your movement and stunning enemies to run past them feels too powerful.
The second idea feels more like the original Gloop Troops, you have to deal with a screen before you can advance to the next screen. The disadvantage to this method is the screens don't feel part of a cohesive level :-(
The third option of only have single screen levels is still a possibility, though it'll mean either adding more level markers to the world maps, or creating more world maps. As we're running out of memory pages on the 128k Spectrum, we'd need to put more level markers within a map, and that makes the map look busier and not as clean.
Wrk continues - it's possible that we might split the project off into a separate future project which can utilise some of these features!
