[WEEKLY] Week 5: Cleanup, Cleanup

Week 5: Update and Goals

So another week has passed. It's now been almost a month since Quaternion development started, and it's crazy to look back and see how quickly the time has gone. But we'll be able to get into the good stuff soon, so stay tuned.

This week's primary goal is Editing Infrastructure: to make sure the functionality in the editor to build levels is in place. As I said last week, there's still a lot of work to be done to this end. But hopefully by the end of this week, I'll have something in place that can be used to build levels without having to use Notepad++ on the .mis file.

This week's secondary goal is Level-Loading: Quaternion is (as currently planned) going to use a different system for loading levels, wherein you move between levels via teleportation devices; there's no level select GUI. As such, the code for this should be in place fairly soon (although some sort of back door will likely remain so that I can still move between levels willy-nilly during development and testing).

The physics code also still has some pretty serious issues. I might look into that sometime this week. Then again, I might put it off for months. Who knows?

If it was really the only person working on this project, that'd be quite epic from him.

Cool, I like that you're going to use a different level-select method.

I remember for Marble Blast 9 the original idea was you'd play in a level which was a main world hub, and it was this big interior you could free-roam.
What you could do is go to any of the mini-world hubs it included, and those would launch you to their own free-roam interiors.
Then from there you could roll to a level's image/spot and then a window popped up and you could read the level name, desc, see best time, and then load level right from there.

I would love to see something like this come true!

Whirligig, you impress me every week! The mod sounds amazing! I like your ideas!

If you do that, BlazerYo is gonna be extremely jealous.

To clarify, I'm not really making the level select menu part of the gameplay--I'm removing the level select menu entirely. Think of something akin to VVVVVV or Zelda, where you just move through an "overworld" in between levels. In this case, the "overworld" will be made of more levels, but only some of them will be "level levels." The teleporters will be used to go between sections of the map, so that I don't have to make one giant .mis file.

This may seem new to all of you (apart from MB9 of course), but it turns out that I've already done this--it was a major mechanic in Project Dragon. Of course, it was implemented rather poorly back then, so I probably won't reuse code.

Is the mod "just me"? Well, in a sense, yes. It's a lot like MBPU: I'm doing the vast majority of the work, but if anyone wants to pitch in, let me know. I theoretically don't need your help per se, but it would be nice.

Wow, this sounds crazy. An overworld is a cool idea. Will there be a certain order you must do the levels in, or will you be able to play the levels at random?

whirligig wrote: Is the mod "just me"? Well, in a sense, yes. It's a lot like MBPU: I'm doing the vast majority of the work, but if anyone wants to pitch in, let me know. I theoretically don't need your help per se, but it would be nice.

If you want I could do some textures made with vector graphics.
By the way, what will the art style be? Will it be more realistic, or more cartoony like most MB games?

I'm not sure if he's decided on that yet. I think we should wait until the game is feature-functional, then try to flesh out it's content from there.

I'm cool with the idea of no level-select. It'll help to linearize the gameplay! (somewhat!)

Some levels will be needed to unlock some other levels, but within that you have some degree of freedom. It's complicated.

The graphics style will involve a lot of neon oranges and blues on a dark background, at least according to current plans. I'd hold off on making too many textures until you've seen some of the game's graphical style.

This is all stuff you could have found out in the initial announcement and the streams, by the way.

This week's stream will be on Saturday again, due to a personal conflict.

Speaking of which, last week's stream is up:

Tonight: stream at 7 PM Central!

www.twitch.tv/whirligig231