Ice Ice Meow 2 - devlog and first update after the jam!

Ice Ice Meow 2 - Let's kick some ice! - JAM EXPERIENCES AND FIRST BIG UPDATE

updates:

- added a new ability to the x-key! You become invincible and destroy everything around you - and  you can use this ability as often and as long as you like! So if you'd hit a spike now just press x. But the tiles you destroy stay permanently damaged and glitchy and won't be replaced in future rounds.

- rebalanced a lot of the food score gained from modifiers, especially from the most dangerous mods

- added new food, now they are different food types that all get you more points than previously (from +1 to either +2,+3,+4, or +5 for meat, chicken, seafood and "big food" respectively (whole chicken or lobster))

- food score gained is now shown when you pickup food + additional sounds

- the ice sea is now way more menacing (added animations + rumble effect)!

devlog:

I never did a platformer before so I knew I finally wanted to make one going into the jam! I think reaction-testing platformers are one of the most "figured out" genre, as a large portion of their mechanics almost build themself, it's hard to not use stuff like ladders or one-way platforms or to find an original replacement. 

On the first day I spent most of my time on getting the controls right and on the procedural level generation. The levels itself are not that complex architecturally but each round a lot of stuff resets and a lot of other stuff has to stay the same - so it gets really complicated quite fast. Almost all objects (ice, plants, ladders, food) despawn when the round is over and get spawned again in different locations when the next round starts. This is the reason for the small lag between rounds as I'm going through the entire map multiple times looking for objects to replace.

Let's say I have three types of tiles a - ground, b -stuff on the ground and c - sky. In the finished game if they are not "occupied" they appear just as flat dark blue. So when the round starts a percentage of b gets replaced by random plants, in the next iteration another percentage of the leftover b by random food, etc and vice versa when the round ends. Ladders follow a somewhat simplified "falling sand" algorithm, they start on a random tile of ground and move downwards until they hit something. But as soon as a few modifiers hit it gets very  messy. There's a mod that adds [?] to food and another one changes [?] to ladders. Now when the [?] despawn at the end of the round some of them have to be changed back into b tiles while others into c tiles. The solution is either to track every single object or make additional rules: if there's no ground tile near a ladder, change it to "sky", if there is, change to it to "stuff on the ground" ... but the second variant makes it even more complicated and might introduce even more bugs!

Anyways, on the second day I spent some time on the visuals and the sound but mostly on the modifiers. In the jam version there were 9 permanent modifiers and 7 temporary modifiers.  I tested each of them individually but didn't have the time to even play a single  "real" round of the game! So I was really scared of any gamebreaking bugs. But as it turned out the balance was quite fine!

Just a few things needed some work:

First, I severely underestimated the impact of dangerous mods like spikes or torches. I intended them to be a minor hurdle that tests your attention but because of the small screen size and the unforgiving jumping mechanics it's quite easy to fall into spikes. I wanted the ice sea to be the main "enemy" which you are constantly scared of and fighting for ground. Now with the new x ability spikes are much less dangerous but falling into the ice sea becomes even more likely over the course of the game! So the new x ability is exactly the missing puzzlepiece and makes the game much more complex, interesting and fun! Still, I rebalanced the food score gain from spikes as well.

Second, the food score gain from picking up food was way too low as well - you could pretty much just ignore it. Now I changed it from +1 score to +2,+3,+4 and +5. I realized the game can be really stressful but there are very little rewards. I wanted players to be more excited  about finding food so now there are different types which grant you different amounts of score. I wanted there to be a very rare "golden food" which adds a ton of score but it looked really bad in the game so it's not included in the current version.

Third, I realize there's not enough going on in the first round. I wanted the game to ramp up slowly and exponentially but watching streamers play the game and walk around aimlessly I realized my mistake. I think especially for a gamejam it's important that people see pretty much instantly what the game is all about. So now the [?] will already appear in the first round instead of the third round.

I'll release another update in the future with a bunch of new modifiers. Other than that, I'll work on a few sounds and add some particles.

This jam was really great and I'm eagerly waiting for the video on it to check out all the great games I missed.

Enjoy the game!