Baby, it’s cold outside…

After a nice break off from the project, I came back refreshed and excited to get back to working on the level design for my frozen area. This is called the “Cooling Zone.” The idea was that in this junkyard the junk gets melted down in the Molten Metal Factory, transported into the cooling zone to cool off, then repackaged and sent back out to some other planet to be used for something else. The levels needed cohesion. So I designed how everything would be connected in the actual world.

Junkyard Level Layout

The cohesion of the world is important to me. It needs to feel like things exist for a reason! Not just because “it’s a game so it belongs here.”

A new area needs a new enemy type so I decided to go with something anxiety inducing. An exploding spider robot! Theses guys move much quicker and are more deadly than the crawling bugs than the previous area. This is the whole point of this area. The Molten Metal Factory is a platforming focused area and the Cooling Zone is a combat focused area. So the thing that makes this enemy deadly is that it can 1-hit-ko the player. The spider robot moves much more quickly, has an audible charge up and then explodes. Depending on the distance from the player they will take more or less damage. These guys are relentless! They will chase the player very aggressively and can only be damaged by melee attacks… that’s right… they explode when you get close but can only be defeated by melee. To me, that’s what makes them so scary to come up against.

Being that this is a frozen area, I wanted to add the ubiquitous slippery ice physics. So I took a lot of time to make sure that the feel of sliding around felt fair but also presented a bit of a challenge for the player. Overall I’m pretty happy with the progress of the Cooling zone. I’m getting closer to getting a nice cohesive junk yard. I’m really looking forward to the polish stage of development. I want to add more life into the world!