Reflex – Dev Diary 11

Levels, levels, and more levels.

This week I have continued to sketch up levels for the game and carefully work out the best order they should appear. Although this may change once I start to play them and find that they are actually harder than I thought.

In the actual game this week I have been making the final adjustments to the breakable doors/walls to make them more visible. 3 new tutorial sequences were put together to show off the power restricted reflectors, the missile duplicator, and the powerbox linked reflectors. The latter is a box that can once destroyed powers down the reflectors it is linked to by wires.

The rotatable duplicator
Power restricted reflectors
Powerbox linked reflector

For the power linked reflectors I needed to go back to the original 4 basic reflectors and change how they were drawn to the screen so that they too could be linked to a power box; previously, these original reflectors (up/down, left/right, and the two diagonals) were made from a single sprite image, however with the need to allow them to be powered down I had to change it so they were made of 2 sprites: the base, and the reflector bar. This way when the reflector is powered down the bar sprite can be faded out.

I’ve also added in to the game levels 2.1 to 2.12, and have the sketches for up to 2.23. Whilst, adding in the levels I discovered that 2.3 was impossible so that has been adjusted accordingly.