Welcome back, for our second dev log we'll be talking about improvements made to the obstacle spawning system, like most features it has improved a lot since the original demo.
The spawning system is another core system and like the conveyors talked about in our last dev log the quality of this system decides just how interestingly we can design the game. In the original demo all this system could do was decide which obstacles were created and how many were being created per second, the obstacles were always randomly placed with only a few rules in the logic such as Lasers or Spinners only being able to be placed on center lanes.
In the current version we have full control over which lanes on each conveyor each object is allowed to be placed on, this is a massive step up as it allows us to do very interesting positioning and themed patterns in the gauntlets. A lot of dev time will go into coming up with many many ideas for how to utilize it, especially when coupled with the conveyor improvements in the last dev log. Variety is the spice of a game like this, and we've found our peppers.
We have a few video examples, such as this one where we split them up by conveyor:
Another useful spawning feature that can be coupled with this is control over which directions lasers can point when created, opens up possibilities with specific risk-reward patterns.
But that's not all, we also have a feature for immediately creating obstacles in an exact lane position, giving us a nice amount of control for more curated pattern designs. This feature will likely be used a lot for Missions due to the more curated nature of those.
Below is a demonstration that pushes the limits of this feature, running 60 of them in a row.
While there's no guarantee, ideally when development of this game is nearing completion I'd love to figure out a way to give players a way to design their own custom Gauntlets. I can already see the absolutely wild challenges people could design with access to an in-game version of the same tools I use to make these... I can also already see the meme-printing, but that's partially because that's one of the first ways I tested the above feature...
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