Devlog #46: Hedge Maze

I’m not doing so great at staying on deadline with these devlogs lately, but when I’m making good progress on the game because I’m procrastinating writing then I’ll use it to my advantage. Here's what's new:

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Hedge Maze

Continuing from last week, here’s what’s new with the maze: I mapped out the whole thing and made it look a bit better (still unfinished). Ghosts now randomly wander through long horizontal stretches of the maze, and you can lean against any upper hedges to hide within them.

I still have to figure out the best way to do the hiding mechanic, and add enough of a buffer before getting caught so the player never feels cheated walking around a corner into an enemy etc.

Having all 4 party members hide along the hedge wall is quite impractical to design, but I think it’ll be a funny visual gag if I can pull it off. I’m thinking that I’ll cut some corners and just check hedge wall space either side and add other party members if there’s room.

The ghost I designed here is the 'maze mage'. I’m still torn on whether to make them a single boss or an enemy type. Might depend on how the hiding mechanic turns out, and how easy to avoid they are.

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Final Area Rooms

Since deciding to do single room screens for indoor areas, I’ve been excited to add the final area to the game as it’s all indoors. Here’s a teaser with the rough layouts for some of the rooms. 

Writing these devlogs can be hard some weeks when I’m scraping together what little new screenshots of the game I have to show, but I always forget that my hand-drawn stuff can be just as interesting. I’ll try and remember to add more sketches for future devlogs (I’ve got books filled with them so maybe some retro-active ones too if they’re relevant ).

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To do this week

Back to a proper to-do list again, on the short side to keep things achievable-

-Finish hedge maze mechanics
-Add hedge maze area NPC ghosts (x3)
-Final area room layout in game

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Thanks for reading!