This is a post I have made on Zinnia Game's blog: https://zinniagames.com/polish-and-problems/

Work continues on Project Petunia as I slowly march the game towards a second playable demo. A significant chunk of my recent work has been on polishing up every area of the game, from movement to UI to even the most base level things like the camera system.

I didn't put much of any thought into polishing the first demo because I wasn't entirely sure how much of the gameplay would even stick from it. Spending hours on making sure mechanics feel nearly perfect would be a hilariously poor allocation of time if I ended up just throwing it all out due to them not coming together into a cohesive whole. However as my previous post went over, it turns out that playtesters were very receptive to the gameplay of Project Petunia even in its most basic form.

So that brings us to the second demo where polish is now justified. My main goal with demo two is to more or less bring the gameplay of Project Petunia into its final form. This means getting the movement feeling how I want it to, nailing the abilities I'll want the player to use, powerup balance, all of it.

Margin Of Error

So let's take it from the top. The first thing I decided to do for the second demo was to implement an actual HUD into the main game. The first demo simply used text for everything, and of course this was fine for the first demo, but we can do so much better.

This is the main portion of the player's HUD while in a level. I've kept things simple as the player's focus should be on the game and not this UI. There is an icon showing the player's current powerup, and their current health is displayed to the right of that. This powerup display also shows up in the world map, which addresses one of the issues I received feedback on in the first demo with regards to players keeping their powerups between levels.

The other major thing I wanted to give focus on was the game's camera system. In the first demo it followed the player. While that seems like all you'd need from a camera, most platformers actually have cameras do more than that. The biggest thing I wanted to change was where exactly the camera moved. Rather than just keeping the player in the center of the screen, we can adjust the camera to not center the player, giving them a greater view of what is ahead.

Notice in this gif that the player is never kept in the center of the screen, marked by the white lines. Instead they are slightly off to the sides of it. It's a strange change, almost seeming counter intuitive to not center the player that is the focus of your game. However once you actually begin to play with the camera like this, it becomes pretty clear that this small change improves the feel of the game quite substantially.

Balance Of Power

The next thing I tackled was the disparity between powerups. This is something I went over in a lot of detail in the previous post, so I won't spend as long on it. I implemented both ideas I had planned for the Glide and Helix powerups. Glide now augments the player's pounce with a substantially larger hitbox. As for Helix, it now gives the player access to a very quick forwards moving dash. This dash can also go off of ledges, and if this happens the player can jump while in the air for as long as the dash lasts.

These two additions cement where I want these powerups to be in relation to each other. Glide is the safe option. It gives the player much more room for error, and increasing the pounce hitbox leans into this by making it so the player is less likely to be punished for poorly spacing their pounce into an enemy.

The dash given to Helix provides it with some movement utility where it previously had none, and moves the powerup fully into an aggressive playstyle. These two changes make Glide and Helix the standard two powerups you'd expect to see in a platformer. One of them is a reliable safe option, and the other is riskier but rewards skilled play with much faster movement.

That makes Bomb the wildcard powerup. It rewards skilled play even more than Helix, but it is also far more unwieldy and risky. I suspect that Bomb will be the least popular powerup, but I think its inclusion is still justified for just how unique the Blast Jump is.

Speaking of Bomb, one of the changes I finally decided to make was to angle the sprite of its explosion graphic to match the surface that it lands it. This is actually very important since the angle of a Blast Jump is heavily influence by the angle of the surface it hits. A Blast Jump on a slope will send the player diagonally, on a wall will send them straight backwards, and a ceiling will launch them down. This mechanic was evident, but somewhat obscured in the first demo by the Bomb's explosion being a circular graphic that didn't change at all. Angling the sprite fixes this issue, and makes it clear what direction Bomb will launch the player.

The Work To Come

That is most of what I care to talk about currently. There are other things I have done, various bug fixes, new platforming gimmicks, a completed level, but most of that stuff doesn't relate the polish and changes I've made to the stuff above.

But it is worth mentioning that with a lot of the polishing out of the way, I can move full steam into the brand new stuff, which the second demo will certainly have no shortage of.