This is a post I made to the Zinnia Games Blog: https://zinniagames.com/the-friday-tiding-5-crush-hazard/

The Friday Tiding #5: Crush Hazard

01 Nov, 2024

Been an all around the place sort of week. I spent a lot of time writing for Project Petunia, but I have also returned to working on the actual game directly after a break from being in the game engine.

Most of the writing work was finally giving names to the characters and locations within the backstory, and a lot of lore that would be spoilers if I mentioned the details. So instead I'll talk about the more interesting thing, which is the actual work on the game.

Tweaks and Changes

To start with, I have spent a bit of time refactoring some of the code for things within the game. This was mostly simple stuff like changing how some enemies activate, their cooldowns between attacks, etc. A few graphical tweaks as well, most notably to the world map.

Here is a picture of the world map from earlier in development compared to now. You can see that I've gotten around to adding a background finally, and changed some of the colors.

Of Quartz

The other thing I have been working on is the second of the six levels that will be in Demo 2. This level is currently called Crystal Level. Real creative, I know. I came up with the theme for this level before I came up with any gameplay gimmicks, which isn't a very smart way to start a level. I'm happy to say that everything worked out though, as this level made a natural fit for something that I've added to the game, Crushing.

When the player gets smushed into a hard surface by another surface, they get crushed. While it sounds simple, the actual code and design behind making it work at all is painful. Basically any area that I want the player to be crushable, I have to add hitboxes to detect when the player has been pushed into a wall. I assume there is a better way, but until I find that better way I'll just have to handle crush hazards like this.

Now back to the level. This level's main gimmick is moving crystals (use your imagination). These crystals can be crushing hazards, though they can also be ways to facilitate movement to further parts of the level. Nothing in this level will be too insane as it shares a spot with Wheel Good in the easy section of the world map, but I hope to be able to shake enough gameplay out of these moving crystals to justify Crystal Level's existence.

Wrapping Up

Still a bit shorter than I'd hoped, but I'm glad to have more progress on the game to report. See you next week.