It's been about two weeks since my last post and I wanted to give an update. For this iteration, I decided to focus on the art of the game, given that although playtesters seemed to understand  the first level, they were still slightly confused. It seemed all of them wished for clearer visuals, and I agreed.

With that, here's the updated first screen. Even though there's much more color and things going on at the same time, I would like to imagine the player has a better understanding of what to do. 

When it came time to create my art, I originally went for a free hand drawing style, drawing the main character of Bob first. As I finished that drawing though, I realized, I don't know how to keep a consistent artstyle. I also tried making a box with lines, and when imported into the game, I thought it looked ugly.

After looking at references, I decided to go for a pixel art style thanks to the simple and limited nature. This has done a great deal for the consistency in style for the game. I had to find a good app first, but once I did, I quite enjoyed making pixel art. I thought up as many things that I could need to draw, and after creating a To-do list and needs and wants list for the game, I knew what assets I needed to make.

Pivoting to this style, I feel, made my scope much smaller. Instead of struggling trying to draw an item completely freehand while also avoiding just copying a reference, I can now look at them and mash ideas together.

When it comes to the design of the game, I wanted to stick to my core ideal of cohesion, everything should come together and make sense in this game. So when I started brainstorming the enemy concepts, I realized I didn't want them to be single gimmicks. I wholly encapsulated Breath of the Wild in these moment, thinking of ways that a seemingly simple mechanic could apply to different situations. Hence with my first enemy, a goomba looking fellow that slows down the player, I decided that it would also slow down certain moving objects or put out fires. This way one concept (and asset) can apply to different situations. And when it came to the programming side, I constantly referred myself to the teachings of my games scripting class in university, where we learned to make code as general as possible. Even though programming the main enemy script may have taken some time, I now have a great basis for an "enemy" that also works as an interesting mechanic. And not just with enemies, I tried to make everything as general as possible. Such as the spawner: instead of making it spawn only certain enemies, I thought about and made it so it can spawn in anything I want just by adding it from the editor. I also chose not to have a health system in my game, as I don't think its appropriate for the style or pace that I'm going for.

This build also adds movement and a camera. A big lesson I took from this build is that I'm a stubborn programmer. If I think I can do it with code, I will. But this isn't always the best things because I might waste my time with a problem that's already been solved. As I struggled with making the camera follow the player the way I wanted it to, I thought to look it up on Youtube before I waste more time. It turns out there was a 90 second video with a solution to a problem I've struggled with twice.

Even though I don't feel like I made much for this build, I feel the need to remind myself of the annoying setting up I needed to make. Much setup was done to ensure the game had a great foundation to make better and more interesting levels. And although I did struggle designing a level, it's that challenge that excites me and the constant programming struggle and solution that keeps going. I also constantly reminded myself of the MVP (minimum viable project) to stop myself from doing irrelevant things. Other problems arose when it came to making this build, namely the boomerang mechanics, but I didn't worry about that. I had a goal with this build, which was to make and show the next level along with my art, and I feel that I accomplished that. But I also realized there is still a lot of work to be done with this game, and that's exciting for me, more than anything.

I'll leave the other art here that wasn't shown off but can be found at the end of the level.