Slide Park Remaster?
No new StartBuster progress this weekend. I took a break from that and ended up putting more time into making a SlidePark Remaster instead. It is not done yet, but for just 3 days of work. I would say it is around 85% complete right now. The PC/Web version is mostly ready. Right now I am just at the point of cleaning up the last few pieces and polishing anything I slapped on as a place holder. The biggest thing left after that is finalizing the levels and hints for each one. I already remixed a lot of the original level order as the original order was kind of all over the place when it came to difficulty. Some harder levels showed up way too early, easier ones were buried later, and a lot of it felt more like “this is the order I happened to make them in” instead of a real difficulty curve. That made sense at the time because I was mostly just building levels in order and I would get better at making levels later after really understanding the concepts and gameplay. This time I want the progression to actually teach the player. The Interesting part is how much this remake has shown me about how differently I build games now and how much I've grown as a game dev. The original SlidePark was made in Construct 2 around 2014. Back then I laid out each level by hand, then later tried to make a level editor that basically spit out a JSON file saying what block was at what spawner and I would have to remake it by hand in the game engine. It was useful, but it was also very much me duct taping a workflow together while learning. This version is built in Godot, and the levels are just (true)JSON files now. Real level files, with grids, rules, hints, par values, and solution data. I have Python tools that build the levels, test them, solve them, and figure out the lowest move count. So instead of me guessing the level is beatable and playtesting until i do, the solver can actually prove it really quickly. It also means I can look at difficulty in a way I never could before. I can see which levels have huge state spaces, which ones are actually easier than they look, and which old levels were secretly brutal. A few levels moved into totally different level packs because the data made it obvious they did not belong where they were. I also added some new stuff without trying to turn it into a different game. There are still the classic sliding block puzzles, but now there are things like switches, doors, wraparound levels, sand tiles, one-way ramps, sticky blocks, freeze puzzles, and breakable crate stuff. I more or less made the version of SlidePark I probably wanted to make back then, if I knew how instead of just remaking the same game. I am also thinking about adding a daily level mode, kind of like Wordle, where everyone gets the same puzzle each day and can compare move counts. Maybe with a small high score table showing what other real players finished it in. Not sure if that makes it into the game or not but the way the game is built now makes that kind of thing feel possible instead of like a giant mess. I remember struggling with trying to make a level editor as I thought all games needed to let users create their own stuff and the games original levels were made by me trying to get my friends and family to just build levels out with the editor i made and now if i wanted i could add that feature in probably a day or two. Working on SlidePark felt looking at an old version of myself and going, “ok, I see what you were trying to do. Let me clean this up a bit for you” As always Stay Dangerous, -Julien
— Julien