I’ve got another update to my teleport based platformer today. As the title suggests, it’s mainly a polish. However, I’ve also finished prototyping some mechanics which allow for the creation of puzzles.
The video below shows the first two levels of the prototype in action:
As you can see, the player has access to three teleporters: normal, explosion and duplicate. These are accessed by pressing 1, 2, or 3 on the keyboard (once to drop the teleport anchor, again to teleport to the anchors location). To make these mechanics into puzzles, I’ve built switches which move platforms, either on a timer or related to the pressure on the switch.
The timer switch and associated platform are highlighted in this second video.
With the way I have designed the teleport mechanic, I need the platforms in the level to be able to move. The player will drop teleport anchors and then go back to them. If the challenge hasn’t changed, then what is the point? This means putting lots of moving platforms in levels. Creating a custom matinee or path for each platform would be painstaking work. In order to avoid this, I designed platforms which could be dropped into the game world, given a start point and a finish point by dragging a widget out, and then hooked up to a switch. The blueprint for this is below:
This solution would allow me to quickly add and adjust many platforms to a level, rather than tinkering with custom matinees. Ultimately, I’m really pleased with the addition.
I will have more to come on this soon. Probably and analysis of my teleport mechanic and how it could be turned into a larger game.
Mark Bridle 