Cotton Candy Clouds
Based on the simple gimmick o’ appearing & disappearing cloud platforms, blatantly ripped off from Wario Land 3’s “Above the Clouds”. Oddly ’nough: I came up with this idea while working on ’nother level with a different gimmick, but decided to introduce it here. That other level should hopefully be done soon.
If anything, the bramble blocks took longer to make. Most o’ the graphics in this game were simply drawn pixel-by-pixel or simply used a photograph I fiddled with in GIMP. These are, I think, the 1st graphics I drew in high-resolution like actual illustrations & then fiddled with in GIMP so that it tiled correctly. They’re still wonky: there’s still some wonkiness with the tiling, & the block interaction’s still weird ( ne’er got round to making parts o’ them act like slopes ). It shouldn’t matter too much, since you won’t see most o’ the brambles for long as you’ll quickly die if you stay near them too long. ’Twas hard for me to look @ them for long e’en while trying.
This was also a case wherein metaprogramming helped, since manually creating all the json files for each o’ the dozens o’ blocks would’ve been tedious. Since the graphics & blocks match up, I could just make a simple Ruby script that generates & spits out JSON files. It also made it easier to make changes to many o’ the blocks quickly.
Originally, I wanted this level to end with 1 last quick burst o’ cloud platform hops, but with platforms that moved mo’ quickly; however, I couldn’t get a speed that was much quicker, but not so quick as to be ridiculous with how long Autumn’s jump too, & ’sides, I thought the level was going on a bit long ( I aim for half a minute, ’specially for an early level like this; this 1 takes a’least 40 seconds if speeding through ), so I snipped it.
Gem & Time Challenges
Something else I hastily ( & sloppily ) programmed in were gem & time challenges. As shown in the “Cotton Candy Clouds” video, holding X while on the level select screen shows the gem & time score challenges. If you beat the level with mo’ gems than the challenge or with a shorter time than the listed time, you get a checkmark next to the gem or time, respectively, & the respective score turns green. If you beat the level, get its diamond, & beat its 2 challenges, the whole level line becomes green, indicating that you’ve 100% it. I’ve already made scores for all the completed levels.
Speaking o’ %, as the bottom-right shows, there’s now a game %, divided by each level. For each level percent, beating it nets 50%, getting the diamond 30%, & beating each challenge nets 10%. Since the % use floating points & rounding, I don’t know if getting everything adds up to 100% precisely, nor could I check, since there’s a bunch o’ unfinished levels that are impossible to beat or get the diamond on. There’s also “Soupy Sewers”, which is impossible to 100%, since it requires an oxygen upgrade I still haven’t programmed in yet.
As a bonus, I made a video showing how to beat the time score in “Cotton Candy Clouds”:
I haven’t done so for the gem score, ’cause it’s too hard for me to bother ( you have to collect every gem in the level without dying ).
