Published, now on to version 2!

I did some final tweaking, added background music and sound effects.  Tested, tested, and re-tested, and decided it was time to publish my level.  I put it out and sent a message to friends, and folk I have met playing LPB online.  No sooner had I published it than I remembered I forgot to add one final element.  It was the yeti’s house, which doubled as the façade that covered up one of my more complicated mechanisms.

I jumped back into edit mode, added the yeti’s house and republished.  As I watched the count of people who played the level climb to 7, but nobody finished, I wondered what was going on.  I played the published version only to find out that my yeti destroyed itself as it snagged on something.  I went back to my workshop and found out it was doing the same thing there.  Who would have thought that adding an object would cause that to happen.  My friend Ben called that the “Butterfly Effect”.  Guess I should have tested after adding that object.

He also sent me an e-mail with some feedback, and much to my surprise, he had a problem before that.  Now, with his notes in hand I am working on version 2 of my level.  Making some changes here and there, hopefully for the better.  My only fear is that some of my shapes are too complicated to modify anymore so I might need to redo large pieces to make this work. 

It is what it is…

Sometime you gotta play a little to get ahead

I’ve been working on the section of my level that takes place in an ice cave.  I was having a difficult time giving it that snowy/icy look.  Part of what I did was use the glass material on the third layer, and stone on the other two layers.  I put a sticker over the stone that was actually the hair for the X-Men character “Storm”.  It had a nice fade from white to a frosty blue and did a decent job of looking cold.

Next, I was having problems with my shapes.  I kept getting a message that my shapes were too complicated, and I couldn’t add anything else.  I looked them over closely, but couldn’t see what was so complicated.  I tried deleting portions of the shapes, but it didn’t make much of a difference.  What finally made the difference was using the corner editor.  I discovered that when I was drawing the shapes, or erasing portions, that the process was creating 3-4 corners for what I thought was a single corner.  By going around the edge of the shapes, I deleted about 75% of the extra corners.  This allowed me to continue adding to the shapes and make my design a little more solid looking.

Finally, when I was playing this weekend, I managed to get to the final section of the game.  Trying to track down the “Collector”.  Apparently he is the big bad villain that is causing all the trouble.  One of the prizes I won was the “Snow Paper” texture.  This texture is a grabbable material covered with sparkling snowflakes.  The perfect thing for my ice cavern.  Using the material changer, I did a quick update on the pieces I had made so far and VIOLA, ice cave.  Glad I took some time out play.