Platformer Prototype: DEV LOG 4

20/03/25: Adding a start screen and a new feature!

 Hello! Today I added a start screen to my game! 

The code was pretty simple all i did was add a new scene which would be the start scene and make it so when the player clicked the button with the cursor it would switch to the main game's scene.

Now with that out of the way it's time to talk about my new feature. If you remember from my game pitch blog post, I said that one of the main selling points for this game would be "power ups" falling from the sky. However, I thought that was a really out of place feature, so I brainstormed a bit more. I was then reminded of the game "Pizza Tower" and their taunt gimmick and thought that I could probably add something similar to my game! 

This new feature is called "striking a pose!" where when the seal strikes a pose in midair, they will gain a lot of points. this move is activated with the W or UP arrow key, and this is what it looks in action:

As you can see, I've also changed the sprites for the background and water, it looks bad but I was never good at drawing backgrounds and this is the best I could do for now lol. This is the full sprite of the one pose I made:

If I were to make this into a full-fledged game, I would've added many more varied and absurd sprites and randomized what would show up to make the player more engaged because its funny. This is the code I used to make this feature happen:

Basically, when any up key is pressed the player will hit the pose while giving a big score and will stop once the player is falling to avoid exploits. I really wanted to add challenge to my game in order to engage my player, but I also wanted to make sure the player was comfortable when playing the game, so I added arrow key binds as well as WASD (or wad in this case) compatibility.

Anyways that's all for today. Tomorrow I will be letting a bunch of people playtest my game and recording my feedback in my next blog post. Kier signing out!!