It took me a week or so longer than I wanted, but I finally have something playable to offer up. Below is an early run from the new ANGELINAÂ system, this time designing platform games. It’s as-yet untitled, very short and simple, but playable. Let me know what you think. There’s plenty more tinkering to do this month, so expect changes as time goes on. The aim of the game right now is simply to get Santa back to his sleigh in one piece! You’ll find powerups along the way to help you. It’s possible to get stuck, so you might need to refresh the page (I’ll be adding in manual reset soon, it’s just not a the top of the to-do list).
The purpose of this project is to demonstrate that ANGELINA has a few new skills from her arcade game days:
- An appreciation for player progression. Games created through this system should have multiple stages of world exploration, where each powerup unlocks more of the world. Enemies should appear more readily in later stages of the world, and so on.
- An agnostic approach to game evaluation. ANGELINA knows very little about the specific game mechanics going on here, and it’s important to maintain this as we move onto more complicated design tasks. For instance, the system doesn’t need to be told to put things high out of the player’s reach if there is a jump powerup around, or to use locked doors to hide powerups. This knowledge should emerge from the system without it being explicitly programmed in.