Devlog #7 - That's-olotl Salamanders

Hey all!

It's been awhile, but I've added a lot since my last post!

The first and most exciting thing added is MORE SALAMANDERS!

For the most part, this just worked. It required me to recode how characters are getting loaded, but they all simulated as expected! They'll currently move through each other, but they'll eventually collide with each other and obstacles, triggering the fail condition - which will require you to rethink your path placement and try again. :)

On the level creation side of things, I needed to make it easy to move and rotate each of these players. I made a simple UI that lets me add/remove players and change the player selected so I move and rotate them.

Before designing puzzles, my focus has been "how can I make designing puzzles and saving/loading them as effortless and frictionless as possible."

I didn't want to bloat my project with rooms for each level and then also need to build the room, run the game, simulate, just to test if the puzzle works. Instead, the entire project is two rooms: a level select hub and the level itself. When you enter a level, a JSON for the level loads all the static tiles, the players, their position/direction, the maximum number of paths for the puzzle, the destination position, and if you previously placed tiles down, it will save your progress and load those too. 

When creating a level, I can do it in the client on the grid instead of on paper and transferring it / rebuilding it into it's own room. My save code converts each tile to an assigned value and stores them to a grid and my load code then checks that value and loads the appropriate tile. 

"grid":[
    [ 1, 5, 5, 0, 6 ],
    [ 2, 5, 4, 5, 6 ],
    [ 5, 5, 3, 0, 6 ],
    [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
    [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ]
  ]

I can easily save, load, make changes while in game where I can test simulating. It's a huge, huge time saver.

And conveniently all these tools I've been making to design levels quicker is 90% of what's needed for an in-game level editor :) I'll entertain adding it post-launch!

NEXT STEPS!
- Add the win condition: entering the platform in the correct order and moving to the next level
- Add the lose condition: player collision w/each other, obstacles, and ends of paths

Thanks for reading! Would love to hear your thoughts!

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- Tapsteady