and I write down things about leveldesign, what areas I want to implement, how to implement them, what assets I will need to make, what atmosphere I want to achieve, what particle effects could come in handy, how I want to lead the players attention and how to make a player explore without having a holding hand?
How to wake curiosity in surroundings, without glowy sparkly signs “here to your next achievement!” ?
How to give player the full freedom of their shapeshift forms and at the same time give them a challenge? How to make terrain and areas challenging without making puzzles or “restricting” the player through locking and unlocking forms?
Several times now it was suggested to me, that I could make the shapeshifting something to “unlock” or to add extra areas that can be unlocked…even though I could say that extra areas sound nice, since they are more of a bonus than a restriction, I don’t feel comfortable restricting the players abilities for the sake of challenge and achievement.
I want lots of other things to be challenging and I want achievements aswell, but the idea I have in my head is more based around, feeling free, but having areas require some thinking or agility with shapeshifting etc. to reach them. And all of that without making one form better than another, but rather make forms have disadvantages and advantages in certain areas. Like as example, the mouse is very small and it could have alot of difficulties going through bushy and overgrown terrain, while the cat is ideal for it, having higher jumps, being able to climb etc. at the same time the bird COULD fly over those obstacles, but it might be difficult to just keep it high enough off the ground to not fly against anything, but at the same time not too high so it wouldn’t crash into the branches of a tree. The mouse could be shortsighted, is slower than the other forms, but therefore it fits through spaces the other forms won’t fit. The bird is the only one being able to go way above the trees and into the mountains and being out in the open it would have most advantage, it would be travelling faster than the other forms, which would be hindering in more tight environments.
The game is about exploring, about mysterious places, about working WITH the environment and WITH the abilities you have. The achievements are rather secondary, but the ones I have in my mind are challenging enough all by themselves without needing to restrict forms 🙂
Progress in this game is shown through the orbs (20 are not the final number). Maybe I can add other types of orbs later on, but currently I want to stay with the simplistic version of this game 🙂 Which is, honestly, complex enough XD
Just coming up with ideas for interesting places to explore that is not “too” worn out by other games and worlds is difficult! And bringing them into reality is even more challenging for me and I DO want players to have more than just 2 or 3 of them 🙂
I have to say though, that I like to work on it 🙂 it’s somewhat more relaxing and interesting than playing games 😛
not sure how visible things are, but the cloud is one experiment, the orb with sparkles 😀
and the trees have falling leafs 😀
fartoindie 
I really like how its coming together.
LikeLike
Looks really cool, I’ll need to try this out at some point.
A couple of ideas that popped into my head whilst reading this (regarding “unlocking forms”):
* You could instead have them be “upgrades” that extend your abilities & make certain actions easier to perform.
– or –
* Have them be purely cosmetic, like a raven or phoenix skin for the bird form. Could even extend it to the world itself, e.g. a winter land skin.
LikeLike
those are good points 🙂 more subtle changes/improvement. and I had something like different skins in my mind aswell, maybe they could be rewards for getting certain achievements 🙂 btw. I think what I haven’t mentioned yet, is that I think I want to make achievements main source of progress, so far I have 4 achievements I can think of, but I didn’t want to state them publicly, because I want players to figure it out themselves XD
LikeLiked by 1 person