![]() The most practical form of designing for speedrunners that you can do as a developer is simply to make horseshoes in your level design all over the place, and leave it up to them to find a way to connect the ends. Even ancient games like Castlevania have skips based on connecting the ends of a horseshoe, using the small boost they get from taking damage to climb up and over ledges they can’t quite reach otherwise. Many areas in Super Mario Odyssey are structured similarly, letting you get to later parts of the level if you can perform the advanced jumping tricks. The whole map looks like a serpentine pattern, crossing back and forth over itself. Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is designed as a series of horseshoes laid over each other, which sometimes makes skips possible, but more frequently is used to dump the player back into earlier areas. You get to see where you’re going, you’re not traveling in a literal straight line, even if you only have one way to go, and you can cut across the horseshoe to the end. John Romero, one of the level designers of Doom, remarked on the Horseshoe level design in the Hangar map in this lets play, as well as some of the benefits of it. Hub areas that unlock into more areas also tend to facilitate skips, if you can find a way to get past the gates blocking you. The Valve Developer Wiki helpfully has some examples of this, which they call Loops and Bounces. The thing that makes such skips possible is usually level design in the shape of a horseshoe, where the start and the end are close to each other in physical space, but are separated by a wall inbetween. This can mean completing story flags out of order, or simply going to an area before it’s supposed to be accessible. Games are usually designed where goals are supposed to be completed in a certain order, a skip is where you complete later goals without completing the prerequisite ones. Please make sure to wishlist us on Steam, we'll be updating the demo on there and here periodically as well.One of the most powerful tools speedrunners have to save time is Skips. Art assets and sounds are being reworked or added if they were missing. So that leaves finishing up Fluffylands, Spaceylands and Pirate Ship biomes.īosses are coming along nicely as well, player controls were reworked a bit, tightened up some more. We blocked out and complete the Flameylands (formerly Hell) biome, started work on Fluffylands (formerly Heaven) biome, reworking Junglelands (probably will be renamed as well) biome. If I were to put a percentage on how far along we are in development, I'd say it'd be around 75% complete. Cost-wise, I haven't actually had the chance to do proper post-mortems for these three events yet (they practically happened back to back), so I'll do in-depth post-mortems in the future. Perhaps if I had a publisher or decent public relations firm backing me up, it could have gone better. Being PAX Rising, I thought I would get at least Tier 2 (hoped for Tier 1) Media/Influencer coverage, but that didn't happen. ![]() PAX South I would highly recommend for Indies. Overall though, I think any DreamHack event is worth it, DH Anaheim will hopefully just get bigger and bigger as more folks know about it. ![]() At PAX South, we were next to PAX Together (facing directly at it), and those folks were getting quite a bit of media attention and traffic. ![]() DreamHack Anaheim 2020 was the very first time it was held, and with it being so new, traffic was pretty low compared to the other two events.A 10x10 booth (like the ones in PAX South and DH Anaheim) give you a lot more space to work with, especially if you're in a corner location (like I was for both events).My PAX Rising pod location was also itself in a bad position, facing away from main aisles, and only 4 feet from another pod facing towards us and when things got busy, there was no room for people to hang out and wait, so they just left.PAX Rising location was in a pretty bad position at PAX East, almost too far back from the front main entrance, too many goodies to distract people before they made their way (if they did).A lot of III/AA, AAA studios still showing off their stuff a PAX East, so it was hard to compete for attention vs PAX South, which is definitely more Indie focused.Surprisingly, we got a lot more out of PAX South than PAX East or DH Anaheim and there's probably a few good reasons for that:
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |