I am working on a little game since the middle of july and now finished my first MVP (minimum viable product)
Its a 2D platformer - fully playable with very simple game mechanics.
Based on a paper game idea by a very good friend of mine from his kid days (i promised him 20+ years ago that i would make a actual game out of this - someday).
It is completely based on blueprints with the following features:
- Tilemap based
- Player based on character controller including double jump support
- Simple generic following camera system
- Player interaction system (Levers, Elevators, Triggers…)
- Up/Down elevator systems which gets requested automatically when player is near a stop trigger (Stops are detected by line traces in the player interaction direction up/down)
- Jumppads
- Spikes and lava, no enemies at all
- Kill and respawn system including checkpoint support
- Levers to open doors / sink lava etc.
- Moveable platforms with obstacle detection (No timeline or matinee at all)
- A very simple main menu
What it needs to got it to a finished state:
- Actual graphics/sprites + proper animations (Currently i am using the 2d platformer tutorial ones)
- Add fitting sounds and music (metal, electronic, classical… dunno)
- Create all 12 levels
- Add a options menu to setup video/audio/controls
- Add in game menu to control basic video/audio settings
- Create actual checkpoints (Spawn system already supports this)
- Add a tutorial level at the very beginning
- More game mechanics (Comes automatically when i build the next 11 levels which are much harder than the first one!)
- Add goodies to collect
- Save games
- Track statistics/time (Speedrun support)
- Include version type and number in a way to edit and use it easily
- A better way to visualize debug stuff (print string is not great)
- Support for creating custom levels (This will require to build a system to generate the levels from a predefined dataset/xml/json/tmx whatsover)
Mistakes i made / Lessons learned:
- I never changed the sprite pixels per unit, which was a pita to get it proper positioned/scaled… in the next project i will definetly not make this mistake anymore.
- Using 3D geometry as triggers, doors, traps was a bad idea
Download MVP-1 (x64 windows only):
http://root.xenorate.com/final/lman/lman_alpha_mvp1.zip
Attached are some screenshots - including the original paper idea from ~1995.
What do you think about this? It it okay for the first mvp? Is it fun to play? Too hard?