Though the topics of each post coincidentally lets me make one post for each season, I’m not sure I have anything of worth to say of the summer level. The original plan wasn’t much beyond its title, “a dancing concrete’s haze”, and the starting viewpoint of under the archway of a concrete highway, with a faded hazy yellow sky (helped by my experience messing with the procedural skybox in the winter level). At the time I was making this level, I was already utterly burnt out on the other 3, and was creatively and physically spent. This level being the one level I didn’t have an actual plan for didn’t help either. I think I actually went a little bit insane.
Petal behaviors clearly don’t mesh well with highways.
I’m not sure why I kept pushing for it to somehow work. One idea had bridges that kept floating downwards, and you had to keep jumping and climbing them to reach a goal floating high above. Another idea wasn’t even an idea. 12 seconds after starting the level you’d suddenly just get bombarded by 300 or so bridges coming in at ridiculous speeds from the sky in the direction of the sun. 9 times out of 10 the collision would hit you so hard and send you flying so fast I’d barely even be able to find where the original land was before it disappeared out of render distance. Art games.
I ended up going back to my roots with a sort of bookend. Throughout the quarter, I’d very occasionally use enormous drops as the signature part of a game or level, to the point where Patrick one day jokingly called an extremely vertical level design a “steven drop”. I decided that doing the mother of all drops to end the quarter was strangely apt (and low effort). Having to navigate gigantic cubes so big you couldn’t manually move them made me nostalgic for when I was first trying to engineer the timing of my Descent big drop. You’d eventually fall so long that even the enormous vertical bar on the side of the level would too fade from render distance, and there’s a solid 2 or so seconds of nothing before the first few bits of black petals fly past your vision. I think in retrospect it’s a fun little subversion about trigger happiness for the level restart button that you might’ve needed for the earlier levels. If you were to look down during this time, and luckily land on one of the petals, you’d get what I think is a pretty cool view. Ending the final project of this quarter with a simple black tree, a model I used extensively throughout nearly all of my games, just felt right, and when I saw the “The End” screen, with the tree against the giant faded sun, I felt satisfied with what I had created and learned.