Dev Log #3: A Time to Break Down, and a Time to Build Up!

After working on the self-destroying wall, I thought a natural follow-up would be a growing wall. Again, I'm stealing liberally from Kirby here.

This is really the same idea, just in reverse. We start out with all the wall blocks placed, but only the starting block is visible/collideable. When the wall is triggered, it creates a hitbox that triggers all the adjacent blocks in cardinal directions. These again have a fuse timer so that there is a cascading effect.

One unique trait to growing blocks is that they can cut each other off. So, if two sets of growing blocks cross the same part of the level, the order in which they are grown will determine their final shape. We hope this will force players to think a little more about the order they trigger switches.

Hit the switches this way one way and you get this result.

Swap them and you get this result.

A couple unresolved issues with growing blocks are collision and visualization.

Since we are introducing collision on the fly there is always the potential of something being inside the collision when it is created. We currently don't have a clean way to handle this. Destroying the colliding object wouldn't make sense since we're making a puzzle game and won't have extraneous pieces that should be removed. Shifting the overlapping object out of the collision is a better idea, but that tends to look a little junky and in general we'd prefer to avoid that situation. Our current solution is simply to avoid placing objects such that they can get caught inside collision. We'll see how long it is before we break that rule. :)

As far as visualization, right now the 'soon to be grown' blocks are hidden. I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not since the player will have to guess and check to see how things grow which may be fun or may be annoying. We could always show semi-transparent blocks instead of hiding them completely or have the backgrounds inform the player of where the blocks will grow.

Anyway, those are our thoughts at this point, if you have any suggestions on how to handle the collision or a good way to visualize the growing blocks, we'd love to hear them.