PogoChamp News

This week I started working on a new way to play PogoChamp: Survival Mode. This mode will take you through the levels of the main game, but instead of trying to complete levels as quickly as possible, you need to complete them without crashing. The leaderboard will show best completion times, or number of levels completed if you haven't completed it. There will also be a daily challenge mode, which is like a mini version of the survival mode, featuring a randomized set of 10 levels. There's still lots of work to do before these modes are ready to be released, but they have actually come together pretty quickly and without many major problems.


I ran a playtest of the new levels this week and I think they're in a pretty good state. I still need to tweak the star times to make sure they're sensible, and then I need to figure out where in the level order to place them. I was hoping to release them this week, but I got side-tracked with the new game mode work. The current plan is to release the new levels and the new game modes at the same time in one big update. I want to make sure it's all high quality when I release it, so please be patient :) .

I started off just making something that looked a little bit like a cannon, but as I added to it and modified the model little-by-little, I eventually had the idea to give it a face. I think that face adds a lot, and am pretty happy with it. If you've got a name suggestion for this guy, let me know in the comments!



And here's some footage of actually playing the level.



This week was when I realized that I finally needed a comprehensive solution for recording things in the replay system. For some background: The initial version of the replay system only recorded the player character, not anything in the environment. Eventually I added in the ability to record the position and rotation of objects in the world, which meant that any level where scenery moved could record properly. After that, I added a way to record whether something was activated, to support things like rings, Jackpot Pegs, etc. This system only supported things that stayed on once they were activated. After that, I added a way to record a change in a decimal value, which let me support things like the scoreboards in some levels. And so on and so on. You may have noticed a pattern here: I was adding support for each type of thing individually, instead of making a comprehensive solution for all the things that could be recorded.

While working on the level teased above, it became pretty clear that I needed a way to record arbitrary data in replays, and that mix-and-matching a set of predefined types wouldn't cut it. I could have gotten away with using the "track positions and rotations of objects" logic that I used for previous levels, but it would have bloated the replay file size for this level, possibly by 50x! I was not okay with that, so I implemented a system which allows me to record arbitrary data along with a replay. The actual implementation is similar to that of the earlier replay features, so it wasn't too difficult to do, and it seems to work well.

This lead me to a little bit of a dilemma: Should I port all of the old levels to the new system? My current plan is to just use the new system for new levels, and not mess with the older stuff, in part because I want to make sure I don't break old Leaderboard replays. Eventually though I might decide to clean up the replay code, and at that point I will probably rework the old levels to use the new system. I think I can do that in a way that won't break anything, but I won't know for sure until I try it.

This week was honestly not that productive. I tried out a bunch of mechanics for new levels, but none of them were really fun, so I threw them out. It happens, and throwing stuff out when it isn't fun is an important part of the game making process. I have some new level ideas that I'll be working on next week, hopefully they turn out better! Anyway, here's a level idea that did work out:


This is another carnival game themed level, but is has a couple surprises in store for you (see lower spoilers if you want to know).
YOU CAN MOVE THE CANNON!
IT EVEN GOES UP AND DOWN?!?!?!

This week was entirely devoted to working on new levels. I mentioned in previous weekly updates that I'm planning to release new levels in batches, so the new stuff isn't in the game yet. Deciding how much of the new stuff to show off vs how much to keep secret is tricky, but my plan is to show a spoiler-tagged preview of one unreleased level each time I have an update to post.


The funnels you see in the image above are actually just made out of 8 different conveyor belt pieces. Getting the angle and the speed "just right" took a bit of testing. An earlier version of the funnel had a much steeper angle, which made it significantly harder to jump out of. This is actually the first level I've made where you jump uphill against a conveyor belt, and it's surprisingly hard to do!

I think I'll end up putting this level somewhere in the 40-50 range. It's not that difficult, for players who are accustomed to flipping & gaining speed, but if for players who are still struggling to gain momentum or who are afraid to flip this level might seem impossible... Maybe I'll put it in the 50-60 range instead....

Have a wonderful week,
Jake

I spent a lot of this week (and last week) working on a single new level. That level took waaaaaay longer to finish than I expected, but I'm pretty happy with the result. I also spent some time this week just relaxing and playing some non-PogoChamp games. Throughout the game development process I've found that it's really important for my creativity and drive to take breaks when I feel that I need them. I work on the game part-time and still have a full time job, so balancing work and recreation is important to make sure I don't get burnt out.


I'll be talking about the new level, and why it was such a pain to make below. If you want to keep the level a surprise until it's added to the game, skip the following section.

I decided that it would be funny if there was a level where you were chased by a bull, and had to "defeat it" by getting it to charge at you and run off stage. My original idea was to make it actually bull shaped, so I built a bull out of simple geometric shapes. Once I finished that I realized that without animating the legs, the bull looked pretty stupid, so I decided to give it wheels. Once a bull has wheels though, you might as well just go all the way and make it a car. Here's the side-by-side comparison of the original bull (right) and the bull-car (left):


Now that I'd decided it would be a car, I had to decide how to move it. I learned that Unity has a "Wheel Collider" specifically designed for cars, so I figured "perfect! I'll use that". It was a big mistake. I ran into tons of issues using the wheel colliders: the car would constantly flip over, it would get stuck in weird situations where it would slowly flip when nothing was happening, controlling it's speed was a nightmare, and it would just randomly jitter while not moving. I spent a bunch of days just trying to deal with some of these issues when I finally gave up on wheel colliders entirely and used a simple rigidbody, and applied forces manually. After I changed I immediately knew it was the right choice, and the movement came together very quickly.

The next confounding factor came with my desire to give the bull car some personality. It's a giant bull shaped car! If it's just driving forward that's a big missed opportunity. I came up with several animations that happen during different phases of the bull's attack pattern, and I think it really gave the bull some character:


While doing this was fun, it meant a lot more work to support replays than just moving the car would have taken. Making sure that the fire effect played, and that the animations didn't overlap or play incorrectly when changing between different focused replays took a chunk of time, but it all "works" now, so I'm happy about that. Overall I think it's a pretty fun design, and I hope you like it when it's eventually released.



I also did some other things this week, like make a PogoChamp TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@pogochampgame . I don't really know anything about TikTok, but it makes more sense to me than Twitter does, and I think suits PogoChamp better than Twitter. I'll be posting video clips on there occasionally, so give it a follow if that's your sort of thing.

• Finally finish work on the new level This is Some Bull.
  
• Prevent powerups from being triggered after you crash or explode.
  
• Fix replay errors in new level Jailbreak.
  
• Added Camera Distance setting to options menu.
  
• Fixed bug where the camera in replay mode wouldn't update when the camera settings changed.
  
• Add some extra safety checks around reading saved settings.