Devlog 03 — Game progression logic, movement tweaks, mini-map

I did a lot of miscellaneous junk this week! —

1. Built out the core logic for game start, end, and progression. The player will be on a quest to locate seven buttons, and after having done so, will need to visit them in a particular order within a time limit. Once they do that, they've triggered the end-game and are free from their curse of looping: they can fall freely off the bottom of the map without getting warped back to the top. All of this is communicated at various points via a new semi-opaque full-screen text overlay that shows up at key moments.
2. Iterated a bit on last week's movement tech, most notably adding a new high jump move which you can only trigger shortly after landing on a platform from a downward dash (visible in the gif above), and adding a line to visualize the "grappling hook" move.
3. Made a "mini-map" pinned to the right side of the screen showing the player's vertical position, as well as the vertical positions of any progression buttons the player has located. The progression buttons are numbered in the order you'll need to visit them at the end of the game, and as you undertake that challenge, the next button to visit gets highlighted on the map.
4. Started "pre-whiteboxing," ideating on the number, placement, and theming of the platforms/islands, and also documenting metrics for player jump distance, height, etc.

The roadmap looking forward is, roughly —

1. Whiteboxing + level design.
2. Quick graphics pass to see if a low-resolution style might fit the game, and to try out some visual effects for the phase move.
3. Actually model the environments in Blender.
4. Sounds and music.
5. Create the endgame sequence, displaying the player's time and a brief cinematic.
6. Start menu, settings menu, pause menu.
7. Polish, polish, polish, polish.
8. Bugfix, bugfix, bugfix, bugfix.
9. Done???

Will write again next week. Thanks for reading!!