This week marked our push through greenlight. I’m glad we went through the process of listing and documenting all of the pieces of the game that we did, it’s put us in a pretty good place to start pushing forward with content this week. Getting a completed, solid narrative in place feels really secure, and has honestly given me a lot of inspiration for moving forward with the levels I’ll be building for Florida this week. To be fair, the stuff I had to make was for the most part just bits, rather than a progression. Which means the player will need to hide in a trenchcoat with Florida Man so they’re tall enough to ride on a rickety roller coaster that they use to fling themselves into the Frog Snatchers’ sky fortress. What a good game.

I spent a little time last week playing around with the NPC tool. It looks like it’s going to make things really easy. The only other extensive time I’ve really spent with a narrative tool like this was working on Breakaway, and that was based on long, specific scene scripts. Centering around individual people obviously works much better with the game we’re making, but I think it’s just going to be a lot easier and more fun. The writings much more character-centric, and the choices are all contained within a much smaller scale.

The most exciting prospect about this week is that I’m finally building levels. I’ll probably be working just with sewer assets or a basic Florida tile if that gets made, but we really need to have something to start working with if we want to have it polished in time. Working without the aesthetics will also be a good test to see how effectively the structural style of Florida feels distinct, and whether it can sustain its own appeal without the goofy Florida aesthetic. It’s going to be fairly horizontal, with most challenge being based around not getting trapped between melee enemis, and using the dash and dash super attack to escape if need be.

That said, the enemies are a whole additional question that we hope to answer definitively this week. Florida has its style fairly well blocked out, and we’ve met and talked about Pompeii a little as well. It’s going to be more about dodging small objects, rather than managing small spaces. We’ve got a couple of ideas for projectile based enemies, such as a mobster who throws another mobster, or one who uses a very slow rocket launcher (allowing the player to parry, jump onto, or otherwise easily dodge the rockets.) We hope to have the enemy plans solidified by the week’s end, as having them working will be essential to making sure our levels work.