Welcome!

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

In the last installment, I introduced everyone to my next commercial project with the lovable little green-cubed scamp, Gappy! People seemed to enjoy what they saw in the previous post, so hopefully, this post will excite you even more! Since you've already seen the 'lift-off' work I'll be showing off some of the mechanics and levels you'll find in the prototype. Lot of what is in this prototype I don't have any concrete plans to add to the final game, they will probably appear somewhere, but this prototype is made for YOU (The player) to push the game around a bit and see what is and isn't fun, and building the final game around what I want and what the players think is fun! :-D

For the more astute readers, you may realize that the deadline for the public prototype is swiftly approaching, and you'd be correct! So make sure to mark your calendars! Call off work, cancel dates, and move around event times! Cause the prototype will be available to the public on January 23rd! on the lovely website known as Newgrounds!

Why that day? Well, it's non-other than the most amazing website-wide events ever! Pixel day! A bunch of cool games made by good friends of mine will also (most likely) be up for you to play as well, so make sure to spread the love to all the projects on that day! Who knows, maybe you'll find your next favorite browser game!

But enough talk! Let's slide into the GAMER ZONE and look at what I've been up to this month!

A Months Work - Expansion and Tweaks

Clip 1 - Wowza.gif

So now that the movement was starting to get into its own, why not make it look nice! This clip shows off a bunch of stuff like the puffs of smoke that appear under Gappy when he jumps off the ground and when in the air, the speed trail of Gappy's figure when diving, the sparkles from collected coins, and (my personal favorite) the bouncing bricks that burst from broken card blocks! You can have good movement all day, but if that movement doesn't make cool little particle effects then what's even the friggin' point...

Clip 2 - EarlyRaceRoom.gif

Speed is a huge proponent of what makes platformers fun! I think a lot of really interesting platformers get bogged down by simply being slow. For example, I've been playing through the SNES game 'Jelly boy' a really weird platformer game where you play as a boy made of jelly who can change shapes and whatnot. It's nothing amazing, but it's really creative and charming in its presentation which makes me want to LOVE it, but it is STUPIDLY slow. Jelly boy walks at a snail's pace, and my enjoyment of that game has been hindered greatly by the value of an internal value, how sad. So with Gappy, a good feeling of speed is of the utmost importance to me no matter if you're taking things slow or trying to move at break-neck speeds! Speaking of break-neck speeds, This race-level area is all about speed! This Gif is from earlier in the month, so it wasn't finished at the time but the idea hasn't changed since this. You'll be using booster pads to fly through the level to reach the finish line, do it fast enough and you'll gain access to a secret area filled with goodies! This area is a personal favorite of mine because it is really fun to try and make small improvements to your movement to reach the end really fast, and moving that fast is just incredibly silly.

Clip 3 - EarlyCrumblingBlock.gif

Here's a block with a face that goes away after you stand on it, that's kinda cool.

Clip 4 - DoorToppers.gif

I added some nice little animated door toppers to differentiate each entryway, I think they're neat. :)

Clip 5 - Pinballdoor.gif

Added a one-way doorway thing that I mostly made for use in the full game, but since it's functional I might as well utilize it for y'all. To those who have played Mario Maker, it's basically the one-ways people use to make annoying, inescapable pits. However, in this game, they are used to tease the player with little secrets and treasures by forcing them to take a more challenging route and spitting them out somewhere nearby. It's always fun to make players search a bit harder for secrets but I do find it fun to hide things in plain sight! Also yes, the whole pinball flipper idea came from Yoshi's island! :o)

Clip 6 - Tutorial.gif

I really hate tutorials in games, in fact, I think it's my biggest weakness when it comes to a developer. I try and have my game design principles guide the player into what they should be doing. But if a player doesn't even know what buttons do they simply won't be able to understand the design aspects I've put in place to teach them. It'd be like teaching multiplication in the easiest way possible to someone who doesn't even know how to add or subtract.

So, to teach the player the controls of the game, I put Gappy in a blank room with nothing but himself, the exit on an elevated platform, and the controls plainly typed out in bold text. Surely, no one can miss the controls of this game, you can't even LEAVE this room without having a decent grip on the controls.

Funnily enough, I allowed some close friends of mine early access to this prototype, and my girlfriend said she didn't even notice the text! I wonder how many other players will be confused and locked in this room, if the same people who played Parallelogram Man play this game, I'd say quite a bit...

Clip 7 -deathandcoolblocks.gif

I showed the race room off a bit earlier but in that clip, there wasn't any way to... start the race? So I added this big blue button that when pushed makes these gritting metal blocks disappear, the same blocks actually appear at the finish line and lock you out of certain exits that lead to secret areas if you aren't quick enough! I really like these metal blocks for like no reason, I just think they look really cool and these will definitely be used in the final game. I also wanted to do that thing that Kirby games do where you race a spark trail all the way to the end, to make it more readable when and why the metal blocks appear at the end of the race, but to be completely transparent with all of you I am just too lazy to do that, sorry. (I would love to do it, but making it look good would be very tedious, so sorry not sorry...)

Also Gappy can now finally face his own mortality now! The only way you can die in this showcase is from falling down a bottomless pit so you won't get to see his little flail I animated until probably a few Levi Posts from now. But the little cartoony, pinhole grow and shrink effect is very cool and I'm proud of it! :-)

Clip 8 - textboxes.gif

I didn't show off the textboxes in the last post I made a month ago, so this is kind of a weird clip to show off, but I really am proud of this cause I hate text systems in games. So firstly, when you interact with one of these blocks it spawns a textbox and accompanied text, however, it doesn't lock the game up, you can even interact with another text box and it will auto-close the last textbox you interacted with and start up the new one. Anyways, these little text boxes are funny and I want to expand on their personalities in the full game by giving them more unique designs and whatnot, something that just isn't very necessary for the prototype and thus won't be in it.

However, in relation to this clip above, they didn't always have the ability to store multiple lines of dialogue, they simply spout one textbox worth of info and shut off, and now they can have a whole bunch of things to say! A bit of a lame way to end off the clip section but I do really like this feature a lot. :-)

Overview

That's all the clips I have for you today. These clips I showed were a bit boring, and I apologize, but the Pixel Day Showcase is just around the corner, so you won't have to wait long to see all of these moving parts in action!

I believe in the next Levi Post, I won't be showing off any clips but rather highlighting some critiques and comments I find interesting when the showcase drops on Pixel day. So, if you wanna possibly see me react in this long-form way, and most likely in the highlights video on youtube, please leave some remarks of what you want to see added or changed to this game prototype, I'd love to hear from all of you!

Also, remember that Pixel day 2023 is on January 23rd! Make sure to not just check out my project, but all the other projects as well! Many cool creators will be making stuff that day and it's gonna be amazing to see what gets showcased!

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, progress is being made on the prototype showcase and 2023 is gonna be 'THE YEAR OF GAPPY'

Hope you all had a great holiday, happy new years, and have some cool projects planned for the year '23

Bye-Bye! <3

-Levi Ramirez