Since other people are documenting their progress, I figured I might as well join it
.
My design originally was for a set of 3 puzzles, based around a "paradox" theme, though after drafting out what I thought would be the coolest part of the level, it wasn't really as good as it was in my head, but i did like the idea of the platforming section I had added in. Though originally I couldn't really think of a good theme to run with this for a whole map.
Now though, I have a kinda abstract theme
. The level is titled "platform perils" - a reference to DKC. Got some really cool stuff going on with the lights, found an awesome skybox, and am have written up some pretty neat scripts, the most recent of which allows me to name any of my entities in the map "rotate" and follow the name by 4 floating point parameters ("e.g: rotate_-1_0_0_0.5" (Param order: x,y,z,speed)) and it will rotate using those parameters to define the motion. Here's a little screenshot, but the map is
far from finished.
Came across a rather interesting physics "problem" today too - as many of my platforms were originally going to be entities I assumed i could just place them and the game would work fine. Turns out that isn't the case - entities need to be within a certain radius of a static object or plane to remain in the physics simulation (which is a little annoying if, say, you want to stand on them). Took me a while to work out why the game was having me fall through only certain platforms.
Also, it might be worth each custom map getting it's own category in the credits, as I am using sky-box resources from elsewhere - and i imagine other people may want use ents and stuff which have been released in the showcase.
Another thought - possible to get people to give you the lang files in a different form, e.g text file with the name as the catagory and the text (in some specified format - E.g first line as the entry name, next line as the entry text and so on) as the lang file data, this should make it pretty easy to write something to just slap together a lang file automatically?