Game Production Diary - Level Select Woes

April 2nd 2016 Another day, another problem. Having solved the pause problems, I am now putting the solution into each of the 20 levels of Cap'n Rescue for PC.

At some point, I decided to look at the level select screen that I recently added to the game, as I've noticed if you re-visit a level the animations are all frozen and the player slides along and can't pick up objects.

It was while trying to come up with a solution that it occured - being able to revisit any level at any time is a complete pain-in-the-posterior (PG Version).

Here's why - the player shouldn't be able to revisit a level 10 times and get 10 times as many points. At the same time, they may want to replay a level without losing their accumulated points.

The solution that occurs to me as I type, is to have a variable containing the score for each level - the problem being that I haven't made the game like that, which means even more changes need to be made. I need to work-in around 19 new variables that don't currently exist.

Another complicating factor is that there are different levels of difficulty, with a different level startup for each - somehow I am going to have to include the difficulty into level select, raising questions like - "How much health should the player have on level start for easy/med/hard?" and "Should they start with any already acquired goes, power-ups etc?"

An easy solution would be to simply display a tick on completed levels, and deny the player return-access to previous levels but, that seems like a bit of a cop-out.

In the words of one of my favourite sci-fi Captains: "Nothing's ever easy."

That's all for now.

Thanks for reading! Stephen

#2016 #classicgaming #stephennicholvideogames #diary #windowsgames #newretrogames #2DPlatformer #2015