Been a productive week

This past week I made good headway on this project.  I learned how to place large blocks of material, one layer at a time, to make it easier to carve out passages and rooms in the level.  I built two mine-shaft-style elevators, a hidden point bubble cache, and figured out how to use water to add a little detail to the level.  The biggest piece I completed was a giant “ferris wheel”, but that’s all I’m going to say about that.  Don’t want to give away too much.

One lesson I am learning, and it is something I read about in a forum, is that scale is an important thing to consider.  I started working on a vertical passageway, trying to add a little platforming element.  I quickly discovered that if I made the player jump their way to the top, they would probably quit playing the level.  I need to figure out how to eliminate some of the vertical climb while maintaining the pieces I already placed.  Shouldn’t be too hard, I hope.

The Game is Afoot

Well, on the heels of a big breakthrough with the combination lock door, I decided it was time to start building the environments the player will run through.  I was a little concerned since the door used about 1/16 of the allowed storage space for the level.  That did not bode well, since I have other relatively complex pieces to add. 

I put some large blocks of materials into the blank level to see how much of the space they would take up in the allowed limits.  The good news was that they didn’t add that much to the used storage space.  It looks like I will be able to put in all of the elements I have, and will design.

Today, I build a door that will give the user access to the first section of the level.  It went pretty well.  I used a wiggle bolt to connect the door to the stone background.  When it is activated, the door swings open, like it is on a hinge of sorts.  Like the other door, I found a sound file called “creaking cog” (or something like that) that plays while the door swings open.

Next on the agenda?  Either working on the decorations in the village, or start working on the cavern portion of the level.  I need to figure out how big to make it to hold the elements I want to have.  That, and design the elements that are going in there.  I have the sketch done, just need to find out if I can actually build the things I want.  If this continues going well, I think this is going to turn out nicely.

And now, the rest of the story. . .

I thought that I would take a moment to talk about the rest of the pieces of the door/combination lock I showed in the previous post.  Other elements I put in the device are a sound emitter, and the door itself.  Both of them are activated when the two-way switches are set correctly and the blocks in the lock are extended fully.  If you take a close look at the top of the door, and the last block in the lock (hey, that rhymes), you can see what I had to do to make sure the door only slid up. 

I added a magnetic key on the door, matched with a magnetic switch at the top of the door pocket.  When the door pulls all the way up, it activates the switch, which triggers…wait for it…wait for it…the last block in the lock which is made out of dissolving material.  When the block, which holds the magnetic key that activates the door and sound emitter, dissolves, the magnetic key is destroyed and the magnetic switch that turned on the door and sound emitter shuts off. 

All that is left to do is to go back and build all of this using grids.  That will ensure that everything lines up nicely, and that I use the minimal amount of materials to build it.  Once that is done I can save it as an object and prepare to place it in the final level.

Lock Success

My idea was to create a combination lock to open a door.  I did a little searching on Youtube to get some ideas for the combination lock, and I was not disappointed.  There were a number of solutions using two-way switches, connected to pistons, which moved blocks of material back and forth.  The last block has a magnetic key on it.  The basic idea is that if you set the switches in the correct combination of off and on, the pistons extend fully and the magnetic key on the last block activates a magnetic switch, which is connected to the piston for the door.  If the switches are not in the correct position then the magnetic key cannot activate the switch.

In order to make it something more that just “flip a switch and open the door”, I discovered I could reverse the pistons that move the blocks.  What this does is to collapse the piston if the switch is in the “on” position and extend it if the switch is in the “off” position.  Since all pistons need to be fully extended, this allow me to create a combination of “on” and “off” needed to open the door.

The best part is that you can reset the combination to anything you want just by modifying the “reverse” setting on the pistons.

To give the player a visual clue, I added small colored LED lights that turn on and off with the switches.  This way you can leave a clue about the switch settings somewhere for the player to find.  Since I couldn’t connect the two-way switches to the lights, I had to build the device just above the wall.

Here’s a picture to give you visual to go with my description.  Any yes, that is the one and only Ironman building my level.

Still Trying

I spent some time trying to get the “object spitter” (see the drawing in the previous post) working better.  One of the tricks I had to use was to add a “loud crash” sound emitter for every object that gets spat out.  I had tried to use a single emitter, with a range that would sense the magnetic key the entire time, but it only played the sound once.  There was no setting that would loop the sound.  It still works since the “comic boing” sound, which is played each time an object is spat out, can still be heard over the crashing.

The next issue is to get the right settings for the object emitters.  I had to find the right combination of the various settings to get a single object to pop out.  I finally decided to go with a 5 second delay between objects, infinite life span, infinite number emitted, and one emitted at a time.  It works a little better, but still not quite what I am looking for. 

The only other thing that would help with this is to find a way to make the piston only push down, without destroying it.  My solution for that was to make the block, that the piston pushes down, out of dissolving material.  When it reaches the bottom it activates a magnetic switch which “activated” the block of dissolving material causing it to dissolve.  This works fine, but I have to reset the level each time I try it.  This gets a little tedious, but if I don’t connect the switch to the block, then it doesn’t dissolve.  There has to be a better way.

Sometime Failure is Funny



Disolving Material Switch

 Today I decided to take a break from my combination lock to design an element that should be much easier.  Basically, the device "spits out" various objects combined with sound effects.  My original idea was to use a stack of blocks made out of the special disolving material (DM).  This stuff is cool in that it vaporizes when you activate it, usually with a magnetic switch (squares on the left in the picture).  I thought I would place an iron block on top of that stack, with a magnetic key attached to it.  The key would activate the magnetic switch which, in turn, would activate the block of disolving material just below it.  This would cause the iron block to drop onto the next block of DM which would trigger a magnetic switch to "spit out" an object (circles on the right in the picture), play a sound effect, and activate the block of DM just below it.  This cycle was supposed to happen 5 times.  Well, to paraphrase Thomas Edison; I didn't have a failure, I just figured out how not to accomplish this.  The DM blocks disolved so fast, my iron block pretty much just dropped straight to the bottom without any hesitation.  I got a good laught out of that and went back to the drawing board.  I ended up attaching a piston to the iron block with the key.  This piston slowly lowers the block, activating each switch with a slight delay in between each one.  Now to fine tune the "spitting" and sound effects and all will be good with this device.  Maybe I can get back to designing that combination lock later in the week.

The Creative Process

I am quickly learning that the creative process behind this is an ongoing thing.  I thought I was clear on what the story behind the level was, but it changes everytime I work on it.  As I get ideas for the various elements within the level it sometimes changes a piece of the "story" as well as other elements in the level.  For example, my original idea had the yeti deciding to go to the village where everyone would discover he wasn't so bad afterall. Now, I have changed it so that he just returns the item he took from the villagers.  I was even able to tie what that item was into the whole store, in a funny way.  Once I did that, I got more ideas on how to end the level, and how to modify the part that leads up to the end.  It will be interesting to see how the final product differs from my original idea. 

Welcome to my diary

I have enjoyed playing video games for more years than I am willing to admit.  I cut my teeth on cutting edge systems like the Atari 2400.  Who can forget the awesomeness that came into our homes way back when.  I got a PS3 recently, and just had to get Little Big Planet.  Perhaps one of the most enjoyable games I have ever played.  Partly because you can develop and publish your own levels.

This blog will follow my trials and tribulations as I learn how to use the level editor, and create what I am sure will be the end-all beat-all of human existance when it comes to video game levels.

Hope you enjoy the journey as much as I do.