The 4th of my 5 level game is now complete. I just put the finishing touches on Feeding Frenzy tonight. I have a few things that I will come back to revisit if I have time after my 5th level, but I'm going to show remarkable restraint and just let them alone for now.
I was a little worried when I finally decided to do the re-write on that level and use a grid style approach for movement, but I like the way it turned out. The movement isn't as smooth, but man o' days is the gameplay a whole lot better! Detecting collisions, finding paths and even working on and tweaking the Jellyfish A.I. was just so much easier to do with the grid approach.
Even with tearing it all down and basically starting from scratch, I was still able to quickly get that level back to the same point and then move past my previous progress surprisingly well. All in all I'm pretty happy I took the time to redo it. The one major downside is that I lost my level editor in the process and I was hoping to use that some in building the"Caverns and Leviathans" maps. I might have to do some rethinking about how I want to set those up given the ever approaching contest deadline.
I'm hoping that even with Father's day this weekend that I'll be able to make some good progress on the game, but we'll just have to see how that goes. What a month for a contest, in June I have a Wedding anniversary, my birthday, father's day, my son's birthday, my sister's birthday, my brother's birthday and both my father-in-law and my mother-in-law's birthdays. What a crazy month to try and get a game done!