Welcome!

Hello, it's me, Levi Ramirez, Game developer extraordinaire. Today is the first installment of The Levi Post where I show off and talk about my projects and life! 

For the first installment, I’m gonna be showing off and talking about my next big commercial project! It's a platformer, with a heavy emphasis on movement and speed. The game stars Gappy, the green cube from the series of games I've made under the same name. However, this game is not a continuation of the games found here on Newgrounds, but rather serves to act as a reboot! The game will be straying away from the ‘infinite runner’ style of gameplay and will instead opt to play like a traditional platformer with full player control. Although the game is still very early in its development and planning phase, I aim to reimagine the story of the 1st game, along with taking locations, characters and mechanics from all 3 games! 

If you've never played any of these games, or don't even have an idea of what I'm talking about, you can check out the complete trilogy here in this playlist I made on Newgrounds. All for free, and browser-based :-)

But enough of what I have planned, what I wanna do, and what this thing even is. I wanna SHOW you what I've already done! Like I said earlier, this game is still VERY EARLY in development and everything you see here is subject to change! Everything you see here is being made for the soon-to-be-released public prototype that I plan on releasing on Pixel day 2023, which is eerily similar to what I did for pixel day last year, releasing a demo for my FIRST commercial game SHOOT TRIP DIE (It even placed pretty well). However, upon release this will be to "incomplete" to be a demo of the game. The Prototype will be built and focused around simply showing off the movement to you (the player) and getting feedback of what you believe could make it better! The Prototype will also NOT be reflective of the final game as the Prototype will be more “open” whereas current plans for the final game will be more of a linear adventure akin to Super Mario World, but that is also subject to change... who knows!

Beginnings 

Okay, okay I know I just said I wanna show you what I've been working on, but humor me will ya! I wanna talk about where in my... vast wisdom... I came up with the earthshattering idea of a... movement-based, 2D platformer... And why this game aims to be very different from its older siblings...

Before the development of Gappy 3, when I had the idea of making another Gappy game, I wanted to do away with the ‘infinite runner’ gameplay of the first 2 games, but didn’t feel like it would make much sense to do it with the 3rd game of the series, and believed it would fit better within a reboot. I also just generally wanted to reboot the series... The first 2 games in the series, although fun, don’t fully capture what I want for Gappy as a character, along with the world surrounding Gappy. Although I’m not gonna be writing some novel for the game, I want the characters to be a tad more fleshed out and feel more alive overall, and I want the whole game and universe it takes place in to feel more alive! But before I did any of these crazy, wild ideas I wanted to complete the Newgrounds trilogy (What I’m now dubbing as the ‘Origin’ games) and thus, Gappy 3 was made!

I knew even before I started this project I was gonna get bored pretty quickly, as I really didn’t have any desire or new ideas for the infinite runner style, so I scaled back the scope of the game tremendously. The worlds only had 8 levels instead of 10, no final boss, and a really simple ‘twist’ mechanic in the form of a double jump. To compensate for some of the lacking parts of the game, I decided to go for a much weirder themes for the world, along with having the game be a bit easier overall for new players, along with also having mobile support be planned from the get-go (You can thank what I learned from Dead Fish Clicker for that.) 

Although I was, and still, tired of that style of gameplay for Gappy, I actually had quite a bit of fun making that game, and it seemed that a lot of people really liked it! And now, Gappy 3 will probably be on the NG mobile front page for all eternity! Thanks Tom!

So after Gappy 3 was released, I not only decided to start this reboot but also do a huge, overhaul update for SHOOT TRIP DIE (STD)! So throughout the entire month of October, I juggled both projects! Truthfully, I showed a bit more love for this new project than I did the STD update, but the update was still really fun to work on and it would come out a bit earlier than I expected! But enough about STD, let’s ACTUALLY see the progress of this new game so far…

Actual Beginnings 

Clip 1 - platformengineshowoff.gif

This is the first clip I have of the game, it’s just showing off a static Gappy sprite running around a test room doing not much other than moving around and jumping, but every platformer can do that! A few interesting things to note about this clip however is that this clip was recorded on October 11th, only about a week after Gappy 3 launched. What’s more interesting is that both the project file and sprite file were both originally created on September 19th. Although it may sound weird, usually when I make a game I start with making the character’s sprite first, just to see if I can transform what I see in my head gracefully into a sprite and if that sprite looks good inside of a game project. What likely happened is that I made this "updated" Gappy sprite, made the project, put the sprite in the project, looked at it, and didn’t touch it again until mid-October. 

Clip 2 - walljumpstuff.gif

If you’ve been making games for as long as I have, you know it’s very easy to make a thing move around and jump inside of a thing, that’s why a lot of first projects are usually platformers. You also just have a lot of things to use as references for what you want your game to mimic. But for this game, I wanted to make a 2D platformer with the control of a 3D platformer, more specifically the style of movement found in Super Mario Odyssey or Mario 64. All and all, I just wanted a game that had really fun movement that just felt good to run around with, and I feel like most 2D platformers usually have 1 or sometimes no unique or fun movement options. Usually it’s a wall-jump, a dash or if you’re feeling REALLY crazy a double jump! And a lot of the time these are stuck behind certain power-ups or stage gimmicks. Why not just allow the player to always have these movement options, why limit yourself? I’ll tell you why… GAME DEVELOPERS ARE SCARED. They know DAMN well they couldn’t design a game with all these movement options! They wanna keep their players on the path of least resistance, well you know what? I AIN'T SCARED! I want you to be able to string together a bunch of different moves to go wherever the hell you damn feel like, And I'll do my damn hardest to reward you for traversing levels in creative ways. Of course, you gotta start somewhere, so I decided to start with the humble double jump, wall-slide, and wall-kick! (With a early 'Wall-slide' animation of course)

Clip 3 - somekindofwallkickingmechanic.gif

To continue with the wall-slides and wall-kicks there has always been something that bothered me about wall-kicks in some platformers, specifically indie games, is the ability to wall-kick up the same wall multiple times. Although it’s fun, in my mind it felt cheap, and I wanted the players in my game to be propelled in the opposite direction of the wall. However, when I showed off the wall-jump to my friends in a discord server and explained my reasoning they pushed back a bit, and explained to me why they thought the mechanic I didn’t really like was fun. From that, I met in the middle and did this. It's a bit hard to notice but i'll explain, since the player regains their double jump when sliding down a wall I decided that if a player decided to “spend” their double jump they can move towards the wall they kicked off of. This is so that players can either double jump to travel further in the opposite direction of the wall or string together a bunch of jumps to scale a singular wall ----. So, it is still possible and pretty easy to scale up the same wall, but the game also deeply encourages you to jump from wall-to-wall, back and fourth as the game will be designed around this idea. This isn't to say that games that allow for same wall wall-kicking are BAD, one of the games that got me interested in game development as a wee-bitty boy has the mechanic center stage (Super Meat Boy). It's just something that I just personally don't like TOO much...

For now, the basics off the wall sliding and wall jumps were finished, of course some small things would be tweaked, but it was now time to move on to the next movement mechanic…

Clip 4 - zippitydooda.gif

I talked a bit about being inspired by the movement of Mario 64 and Odyssey, But I watched a TAS of Celeste a few weeks prior to working on this projects and the speed you can gain in that game is insane, especially through the little dash you can do. I’ve never played the game myself, although I plan to sometime during development. Anyways, I thought it’d be cool to add a way to not only get some cool horizontal movement option outside of running, but also something to allow the player to gain more speed semi-actively, similarly to the belly-slide in Mario Sunshine or the long-jump in Mario 64. I think a lot of the more challenging portions of the game will be built on using the dive for a plethora of platforming challenges, who knows…

Clip 5 - cameraepictime.gif

After I got the movement more or less where I wanted it, I started plopping in some stuff to interact with. Although not the main focus of this clip, here you can see the unfinished and freshly-added card blocks and coins that do an astounding amount of nothing! A cute little running animation, and a blue bar to figure out how big I want the hud to be. The main reason for this clip is to show off the camera system. This game is gonna be very “horizontal” structured. Something I love about Mario 3 and Mario World's levels in particular is the way the camera doesn’t scroll up in some levels unless you get REALLY high up, and there you can find cloud platforms and what not… It’s something only really skilled players can reach and know about but it doesn’t confuse players who aren’t so skilled, thinking they are missing out on some very vital piece of the level they seemingly can’t reach. I want levels with little nooks and crannies just hidden out of sight of the player... >:)

“But how will people know there is something up there?” Then it’s not a very good secret, not every secret needs a crack in the wall or a strange pattern drawn in bushes, you just need someone to wonder to themselves “can I get up there?” Secrets are made for those who are willing to find them! 

Clip 6 - thepit.gif

Holy mackerel! A whole bunch of new stuff! A pretty lookin’ hud, intractable blocks and coins, and probably some tweaks and changes of the movement. Speaking of the movement, this clip was made to show off just how long of a distance you can travel while not touching the ground! It’s very fun to just hop and skip around these liminal void rooms just seeing what feels fun and what doesn’t, and I was starting to feel much better about moving forward past just focusing on movement, although even still it gets tweaks cause everything can always just be a wee bit better… 

Clip 7 - hubareadraft_01.gif

So with the movement and basic “interactables” implemented, I decided to plan out how I would go about laying out the prototype. I decided I’d go with a sort of “free roam” approach, allowing players to pick where they wanna go. This would involve players going into areas that allow them to play around with the controls in different scenarios and contexts, like moving platforms, vertical climbs, a timed running section, etc. All of these areas would lead back into each other through a hub area you’d reach after being taught the controls, where you could pick and choose which order you wanna play the challenges. 

This was the first “draft” of the hub area, and this is the beauty of recording all of this footage, the hub area looks COMPLETELY DIFFERENT now! I’m someone who doesn’t usually capture footage of my games in development, as I’m too busy actually developing the damn game, but this clip in particular is such a cool little piece of “history” for me :-) 

Clip 8 - glitchedcloudbehavior.gif

This last clip is just a little bonus clip, as I actually haven’t been able to work on it TOO much recently, and all the other clips I have are a bit spoiler-heavy, and wanna save some stuff for either after the prototype releases or just for next month’s post. But this clip shows me trying to fix a problem I was having with these little cloud platforms. When you jump on these clouds it kinda sinks and reacts to you landing on it, the problem I was running into was if you HELD the jump button when you landed on the platformer you’d kinda weirdly float above it and if you even did it slightly it would sometimes eat your jump input, so if you landed and wanted to quickly perform a jump the second jump wouldn’t happen… WHAT A BUMMER! I obviously didn’t want the player to deal with this really lousy-feeling platform, but I didn’t want to sacrifice the cool little animation that happens when you land on the platformer (what I originally thought the issue lied) so I was spitballing ideas, and this silly clip came out of it. The problem is fixed too, it was the easiest and the LAST thing I tried. :,]

Overview 

That’s all the clips I have for this post! I think I’m gonna try and show around 8 clips each post, I love showing stuff off but I also don’t want EVERYTHING to be released right away, if I drip-feed you, you’ll be beggin’ for moar!

Also the Prototype is just around the corner so you won’t have to wait too long for you to just EXPERIENCE the damn thing, but I hope these really early development clips show you some insight into how a project like this starts and where it can lead only after a short amount of time! 

After the prototype comes out, and I work on the true vision of this game (after digesting some of the feedback I get from it) I’ll try and show more “varied” clips off, as to not just kinda show you the same ‘I slightly changed the movement in this clip, and started but didn’t finish this mechanic in this clip’ every post. Trust me, cool stuff is on the way! 

A chunk of this post regarding some fun irl stuff I did this month had to be cut from this one due to my over-abundant use of pictures. I wrote all of this on Tumblr first and then copy-pasted it over here, if you are only interested in the game development stuff then your journey more or less ends here, if you wanna read just a little bit more about your favorite Newgrounds dev. (which is me, just to remind you) then you can check out the Tumblr version here! I'll probably make a habit of keeping the IRL stuff over on that post, just so that the Newgrounds one is more focused on the actual meat n' potatoes of the post. If you wanna see the entire post without any cuts than I would greatly encourage you to follow me on Tumblr as well, they will be posted both here and there at around the same time! :-)

Final Thoughts

So yeah, obviously if you couldn’t tell by the big ol’ giant numero uno in the title of this post, this is the first of these types of post, I did really enjoy writing this and it allows me to speak my mind in the truest way possible, but god damn do they take forever to write, so I hope you all enjoyed it. I know it’s long and I make things very wordy but I write pretty similarly to how I talk so if I ever go to a NG meetup then I guess you’ll be prepared?..

Anyways, I hope you all have a good rest of your day, and I’ll see you in next month’s post, bye! <3

-Levi Ramirez