The development of "BonusDrill"

This level was definitely a lot less straightforward than I expected, for a variety of reasons. Here are some of those reasons!

What Even Is A Bonus Level?

I'm still figuring that out! Main levels focus on two or more mechanics and the interesting combinations they have, whereas the two bonus levels so far have focused on different applications of a single mechanic. For this first Patreon build, I wanted to leave a good impression, but I overestimated how flexible the drilling mechanic was on its own... and underestimated all of the effects I wanted to implement.

Drilling Effects

The effects for drilling weren't quite finished in the SAGE demo, but it didn't really matter since there were only three spots in the whole demo where drilling was possible. Now that I was working on a level centered around drilling, I realized that the move wasn't visually very interesting- so I had to figure out how to implement smooth drilling tunnels. 

This was a problem that I had been trying to deal with for quite a while, as I originally wanted the soda bubble particles to have merged outlines. I thought that I'd have to write a shader that rendered the particles seperate from the main scene, generate an outline around every pixel that was filled in, and then take that image and put it back in the main scene. Complicated and hard! (And probably not very performant...)

The solution I came up with was a lot simpler: Layer three particles at the same position. Given that only the penguin can generate these particles, there should be minimal impact on performance.

After that, there was still one problem left to solve: Unity doesn't natively support sprite masking for tilesets, meaning that these drill particles would be visible outside of the drillable material. Not good!

Thankfully, I can write a tilemap shader that would write to the stencil buffer only if a pixel is filled in. I was worried that I'd have to do something a lot more complicated!

I did want to add just a bit more to the drill tunnel effect; I wanted the colors to match the tileset being drilled through. In the interest of time though, I just recolored the drill tunnel sprites to white / cyan / blue to match the snow tiles- I'll revisit the drill tunnel color at a later date, if / when it's needed.

Level Design

I found that the level design just... wasn't that engaging. Compared to the slope jumping of the second bonus level, drilling is far more inflexible: after all, it is locked to cardinal directions. 

This was the room that originally introduced faster drilling methods.

Most of the level design at this stage boiled down to deciding whether or not to use a forward burst or an up burst in order to drill through the next block. If a room only focused on one of those burst types, it became exceptionally flat. 

I considered implementing diagonal drilling, but that'd go against one of the goals of these Patreon bonus levels: they should be easy to develop, and I shouldn't be adding any new mechanics. I wound up getting stuck for a few weeks; the level only used the drilling mechanic, and there was only so much you could do by placing drillable blocks in novel ways. If I'm bored making these rooms, then the player probably isn't going to have a very fun time playing them either.

With the deadline approaching, something had to give, and I lifted the arbitrary restriction to only use the drilling mechanic in the level. I implemented falling drilling blocks, which helped give the level a more satisfying conclusion. That meant that I had to go back and redo how the drill tunnel effects worked though, since the drill tunnel wouldn't move with any falling blocks.

See how the brown patches appear to move up as the structures move down?

The level still needed a bit more... so I decided to add whatever would help emphasize the drill move the most, including icicles and moving lasers. 

Finally, the level is interesting. In the end, I still only spent half of the time working on the level design for this compared to a normal main level.

Miscellaneous Dead Ends

In order to make this bonus level stand out compared to the SAGE demo, I tried a few visual experiments:

• Abstract, animated drillable tiles
• New abstract BG
• New drilling animation

I wasn't happy with the results of these visual experiments, though, so I decided to scrap them for now. (Unfortunately, I didn't save any recordings of the WIPs.)

The bonus level still needed a new drillable tileset, and while snow didn't exactly fit the abstract theming, it could at least be reused in other levels.

Lastly, I had a hard time deciding how to handle exiting the drill state. In the SAGE demo, the drill state would always exit to the burst state, but exiting to the slide state felt more natural for the spinning animation and opened up more shortcut opportunities.

I tried:

• Exiting to the slide state by default

The player would often get stuck on the wall / ceiling if the level design didn't accomodate for it, and I would have to make a fair amount of changes to the current level design for it to work.

• Exiting to the burst state only if jumping out of a drill block

This heavily restricted the shortcuts that were avaliable from exiting into the slide state.

• Requiring a slide input (holding down or dive) to slide out of a drill block

The inputs for this didn't feel very good / natural / intuitive, and it also felt like overcomplicating the drill exit.

In the end, I went with the first option and modified most of the rooms to better work with it.

Development of Level 5

Visuals here have not been finished yet

Alongside the development of "BonusDrill", I've also been working on the fifth main level. Unfortunately, development of level 5 is also taking longer than the development of any other level, for reasons that I'll get into in the next post, when I preview the main mechanic. Thanks for being patient with the development of these levels!