Day 11 - Screen Flow and Procedural Level Design

Today, i designed the screen flow for the game. I kept it as simple as possible. While doing it, i adjusted the ingredient design. I was not completely happy with the idea of Taco having hit points. It was adding a resource to manage, which could be cool, but it was not satisfying that a bush ingredient remove 1 HP and a solid wall kill you. In fact player were managing only the resource to survive bush, but it had no value in front of wall. So i simplified, by removing the management of Hit Point. I instead focus on making ingredients related only to movement. A bush slow you. A wall stop (kill) you. A bonus increase temporarily your speed. 

I'm a huge fan of automatically generating levels. Because, well done, it keeps thing unpredictable. Each time you play, it might be different. Also, it's possible to generate more content in less time. So i designed a simple level design principle : player encounter a challenge, with obstacles, then player has a rest moment where he might find a bonus. These challenge and rest moments always alternate until the player hit a wall or reach the ball. Then as the player progress toward the ball the difficulty of the challenge rise progressively. An algorithm increase the difficulty parameters steadily and insert a bit of randomness. Between "run" (each time taco catch a ball, we start a new run), the algorithm increase the number of challenges and overall challenge difficulty. here it is! procedural level design!