APD - Week 2 - Tinkering

Theme: Tinkering

Method: Played around with an old platforming prototype I made in Gamemaker, and tested out different ways of having players traverse the space

Context: Game design. A few inspirations from N: Way of the Ninja, and bullet hell games.

Response:

As with CPS, I found the concept of tinkering to be difficult to wrap my head around. At first, trying to make things without any sort of goal in mind seemed too foreign to the way I usually do things, so I decided to limit myself to working within a project I had started in the past.

What followed was a series of experiments on space. I tried to come up with increasingly more complicated ways of having the player navigate a square room with the existing jumping and grappling mechanics. First I increased the spawn rate of enemies, then added in narrow gaps that were difficult to fit through while dodging said enemies, had enemies spawn more enemies as time went on, and at one point I even deleted the floor so the player was stuck bouncing between two very small platforms to avoid being hit.

...Unfortunately, Gamemaker decided to stop working before I could make a video of those last two steps.