So much ToDo

Just thinking out loud - so I might as well type it down. Getting near the end of January so I only have a little time to get stuff working. I need to think about Scope Creep and limiting how much I bite off so that I'm sure I can chew it all.

I went to a doctor appointment with my wife on Monday and I had a Remicade treatment at the hospital on Wednesday, so I've had a few days not at the computer - which means less getting stuff done, but more general thinking.

It also gave me the opportunity to finish reading Spelunk by Derek Yu - I highly recommend this book. 

Other thoughts:

1. I was going to do this complex "shoot a bunny and it smoothly moves to the top area and waits - then shoot a second bunny and it also moves to the top area and then they make babies and you gain score from them like a clicker game" (that's a lot of words). Instead, the first bunny just gets marked with a heart icon and then when you hit the second you score points. Much easier.
2. Back when I was making games for the original NES, my boss was very good at Super Mario Bros. He had a term for when you tried to collect too many coins and died, "Mario Greed". I was thinking that there would probably be something similar in my game where you try to hard to shoot a particular bunny (matched pairs are worth more) and hit the ground and die in the attempt. I want to make a "Cupid Greed" t-shirt and promote the term.
3. The bunnies should be spawned with an area defined so that they can move around in that area and be harder to hit. Something like they can move within a small circular area and the spawner should make sure when they spawn it is somewhere they can do that movement. So keep them away from edges when spawning.
4. SCOPE CREEP - Remember, there's lots of potential to add stuff and make this a more complex game. But this game isn't that.
5. The bunnies move a little bit and also rotate (I have the graphics for them to rotate already.) That means the player can't always see what color a bunny is.
6. The player can fly OVER clouds if necessary and even go off-screen at the top - but they can't go TOO high. Have some kind of warning message.
7. The player dying on first contact with the ground or a cloud is a LOT simpler than implementing a lives system and damage etc. That's easier to do and makes sense with the gameplay.
8. Difficulty should ramp up with the levels. That can be done by letting there be more clouds and letting the ground reach higher heights.
9. Put ads for the t-shirts in-game. T-shirts are the primary means I have to monetize at this point.
10. Have in-game ads for the website and mailing list.
11. Regarding the in-game ads - I think they're going to just appear on the ground and scroll by. I may make a special high value bunny that appears near ads so that people are excited to see an ad come up.
12. The bunnies score by color ROYGBV (no difference between indigo and violet - as Isaac Asimov used to call the color: poiple). The bunny colors are also done in some kind of pattern so people with color blindness can discern them - at least somewhat.
13. Spelunky page 186 - everything about the Eggplant and getting publicity.
14. I was thinking about making the ground with tiles and started with 200 pixel wide tiles, and then thought 100 pixel wide allows more design variation, and then started thinking in terms of how powerful PCs are now and I could just make them out of 1 pixel wide pieces so that I can make them go up or down however I want via code so that they do it smoothly.
15. Spelunky page 148 REMEMBER THIS:
    "The last 10% is the last 90%."
16. Spelunky page 146 "Art is a place for ideas, particularly offensive ones."
    That's my justification for making Flatulent Cupid, and I'm sticking to it.
17. Spelunky page 178 - difficulty should ebb and flow
    It should be easy for me to make the spawner periodically put in a stretch of relatively flat ground and easy to navigate to allow the player to relax for a few moments before the gameplay gets tense again.
18. I put up an itch.io page to show the work-in-progress, but it has a message "This page needs to be reviewed by a moderator before it can go live. It should be available shortly." and has had that message for several days. I emailed support on January 21 and I am waiting. Gonna need to figure out something soon.
    

    

    

19. I want to have something on the site to use as a Valentine promo - send a farting Valentine or similar. Not sure how to easily make a web page play a sound, but I lived through the era when all web pages had their own music so I'm sure it can be done.

Note to self regarding Scope Creep:

Look how easy it is to make a gigantic ToDo list!

- Eric Shefferman