The world of Caesura is broken up into rooms. To connect these rooms together, we have a system called “portals.” Currently, the game starts you in a forest area, which was the first playable level we made. Lately, team members have been adding a bunch of random platforms to the forest, complete with invisible platforms that teleport you to random locations when you stand on them. To test out your area, you start the game, run and jump to your private platform, and are whooshed away to the area you actually want to test.
Most of these platforms randomly teleport you to an area when you jump on them. Some of them are there to make it easier to jump up to the other ones. It’s like a central teleportation nexus.
If that situation strike you as a little weird … well, yeah. It’s a little weird. It is, technically, possible to start directly in the area you want to test, but it involves finding a particular bit of source code and editing the source code. Alternately, our game engine allows you to start in the current area by pushing F6–but that, unfortunately, is broken. Or at least it was, until this week.
The central idea that makes Caesura special is that we’re not just a platforming game–we’re also a rhythm game. Our levels are designed so that the creatures, platforms, jumps, and gems all pulse to the rhythm. Everything is carefully timed so that when you successfully dash or jump with the rhythm of the music, you’ll successfully navigate our puzzles. This involves lots of math and an unusually complicated bunch of code for handling the soundtrack. That extra code for handling the soundtrack has been breaking whenever you start a level–which means the only way to keep everything working an in sync was to start from the beginning every time and then walk to whatever area you wanted to test. It was a pain.
The details of what I fixed are pretty mundane. I figured out another way to organize the music code so that it loads properly even when you don’t start the game through the “front door” of the title screen and first area. We’re currently focused on getting a playable demo together, and that means we have a lot of areas to build. Hopefully this helps us build those levels just a little bit more quickly!
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