Platformines – Customizable Characters, New Weapons & Enemies
After the success of Platformance, Cedric and Ludovic decided to use their engine to build their next big game, Platformines. Following fan feedback, the two friends decided to add weapons in order to make the upcoming game even more exciting!
Platformines has integrated the comical “flying eyes”, bouncing on the world blocks. According to the dev team, this feature allows players to use 2 skills: “Players needed to avoid obstacles coming from everywhere, and they also needed to focus on killing them”. This first draft of the monsters/enemies is still within the game, numerous versions after the initial alpha!
When remembering the creation of the weapons, Ludovic says: “To shoot those “beholders monsters”, we had equipped our hero with a shooting fire weapon. At first, it was a “simple” 6 shots weapon with loading, reloading range and bullet speed properties. We could already play with these parameters to start introducing random weapons attributes in the loots of the game.”
The enemies’ creation process went through another step when Magiko Gaming thought about producing a human enemy having the same properties as the hero: move on the ground, change direction, jump several times and use multiple weapons! When creating new enemies, Cedric states: “It was one of the toughest challenges, as we needed to allow these new enemies to move realistically in our random environment. We developed a way to process path they could go through. The first prototype was reassuring: Path generation and loading were not too long and human enemies could now move!”
This encouraging success led the developers towards the next step: creation of the weapons! At first, Cedric and Ludovic thought about:
- · Classical shotguns (short range, 6 bullets)
- · SMG (25 bullets)
- · Grenades that can destroy the landscape (“It had to be cancelled due to several constraints related to the platforming requirements”)
Following the grenades’ cancelling, “Another idea came to us: shooting slow but very efficient bullets: a bazooka! It launches bullets that produce a blast when they hit something. To balance the blast (which can hit several enemies at once), we made these blasts dangerous for ourselves => your own blast also hurts you if you are hit!”
The next point that Platformines developers worked hard on is the customisation: “We decided to offer a full character customisation: Head, nose, mouth, shirt, and trousers can then be chosen among dozens of choices! We can obtain thousands of different characters thanks to this.”
Cedric recalls that customisation was offered only for Male characters at first (even if they had also a Female model in-game). After the first beta provided, lot of players asked to have the customization possibilities for Female characters as well: it then went on the dev team task list!
To conclude on the customisation part, “Female and male customisation allow both sex players to choose whatever they want their hero to be. Also, if the players loot a female princess wig from an enemy, they can use it on their male hero!”
