Hey, guys and gals. How's it going? Hope y'all having a great time. As for me and Against The Mountain...well, more work has been done on the level design department. And surprise surprise, I've been dabbling into the story a bit. Well, more specifically the main villain. And even more specific, the main villain's motivation. Let me tell you about this first

Now, I've written dialogue in the past for a previous project, so this is not new territory for me. What is new territory is the complete freedom I have to take the story wherever I can fall in love with. And what's also new is that I have the opportunity to create a villain. As a bonus I do not have a time-frame for completing it, which is amazing. In the previous project that I did, I did not have the luxury of time nor having villain. Imagine having one week to work on dialogue for about 10-15 missions and you can figure how that turned out (spoiler alert: bad). But not here!

What I did accomplish was to crystallize the main villain's motivation for doing the things that he did. Because I do not want to give you any kind of spoiler, I'll keep it both specific enough and vague enough. I hate vagueness with all my being and I don't like telling you guys anything remotely vague, but it's the story we're talking about here and I need to keep as closed of a lid as possible.

Anyway, so the villain's gripe is that he essentially despises people who destroy things others have built and will go out of his way to get rid of people like this. In his main motivation monologue, he will reference an event that happened in his youth about how people enjoy destroying things and how people generally revel in any sort of destruction. This, coupled with the fact that he considers himself a builder and anyone who interferes with his work is automatically labeled a destroyer makes for a grounded, believable and dare I say relatable villain.

This is as much as I can say without spoiling anything. Told you guys it's going to be vague.

Anyway, moving on to the level design progress. To give you some context, I am in awe with sequoia trees. I've never seen one in real life and it's on my bucket list to see one with my own eyes. They also make a great subject for any artistic medium, whether it be film or photography. But I haven't seen many games that have sequoia trees. Maybe there are some out there, but haven't really seen them. So with this in mind, I've started to build a level based on a sequoia tree. More specifically, inside the tree and outside/around it. Here's the scale of things:

Now, I've done my research and found out that the tallest tree is about 95 meters / ~310 feet tall. There were bigger trees, but this one would be the tallest tree still standing. Well, the tree in the game (which actually has a name, "Father of the Forest") is 200 meters / ~650 feet tall. The tree's bark thickness is 4 meters / ~13 feet thick and I did not calculate the circumference/girth, all I know that the radius is 20 m/65 feet. I intend to give it a backstory as well, when the time comes.

Anyway, so the gameplay implemented is inside the tree and here's how it looks like:

While testing it, I found that it's both very fun and absolutely infuriating at the same time. There are a lot of places where you can near miss the jump and (because of the wall-run mechanic) accidentally start to wall run again. Now this is technically an issue, but as you might remember, the wall run will always work on exactly 90 degree angles, which is what the cylinder placeholder currently has. Now it occured to me that I could've used a cone BPS, chop it's top and make it so that the base and the top are not equal in size (top must be slightly smaller).

With the restrained space, I found that I can vary the mechanics a lot and it would create a desire in the player to chain these traversal mechanics. Evidently, this is something I want to explore further. Also evident is that I should keep this in mind for all levels, like DUH!

Though I haven't spent that much time on it, I did have a blast figuring out the gameplay. If it's as fun to play this level as it was working on it (even though I barely started) then by all means, Gods Of Computer Games, bless this level.

Here's some more shots:

Anyway, that's all I have for today. See ya in the next post, bye!