Introduction

This is just going to be an overview of my thoughts on what I’ve worked on in “A Bouncing Tale” since it initially released for VimJam.

Difficulty

I got a lot of great feedback from people playing the game during the rating phase of the jam. The most common feedback I got was on how tough it was. While this is what some people really liked about it I felt there was a way to alleviate the problem. My initial thoughts on this were that the levels rampup in difficulty very quickly. So far I have re arranged the levels in an order that I feel makes more sense. In the future I plan on having more levels that ramp up in difficulty slowly.

Scores and Saveing/Loading

A big part of the game for me is the timer and seeing how quickly the levels can be run through. Based on feedback gotten I changed the end of the game to show a lot more information including the players best time, individual time for each level, their best time ever on each level and finally the sum of their best times. As well as this, I finally decided to learn how to save game data so that records won’t be lost. This was interesting to learn how to do and I feel there’s a lot more to learn about this as the game grows. One thing in particular is maintaining saves as the game grows and more data needs to be stored.

Menu/Options

The options needed a bit of refinement as they were added quickly to different menus. The first change was to manage them all from the same node which could be accessed from the main menu and the pause menu. As well as this some quality of life features were added such as being bale to hold down the button to increase and decrease the volume. Finally I was able to save this information in a configuration file so that it doesn’t need to be set each time again. Godot makes this pretty simple with its ConfigFile helpre class.

Controller Support

Adding controller support was a lot simpler then I had initially thought. The first decision I made was to combine the jump button and the down swing button. This works surprisingly well and the rest of the buttons are mapped to their respective direction. The input manager in Godot made this quite easy. I plan to look into the ability to remap keys in the future which will be an interesting challenge.

More Levels?

I have ideas for new mechanics and levels that I plan to build out in the future. I wanted to get these initial technical challenges built out first before fleshing out the game further. I have a few more quality of life changes to make.

Conclusion

I’ve learned a lot by implementing these systems and I feel there’s a lot more to learn as I go. I’m excited to build more content in and to refine some more vicual aspects such as the particle effects and background art. I feel there’s still a long way to go but I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Thanks for reading :)