This project was initially created for a three day game jam. My first challenge when making this project was the deadline, in fact I had joined the jam two days into the jam. This meant I only had a little under 24 hours to complete the game. I accomplished this goal and was happy with the overall idea of the game, but some things definitely need some fine tuning. 

For the last month I have made periodic changes but nothing drastic, that is until now. The initial build had around ten levels and over the last month that grew to 18, 16 that made it into published versions, and two additional concept levels. My newest build which went live nine hours ago, has only nine levels. Instead of focusing on adding new levels, I changed focus to developing longer levels instead of more levels.

Now that I've created new levels with larger areas, checkpoints were required to save player progress throughout each level. Mistakes are crucial to the game but without checkpoints players would be forced to traverse the same level  over and over only to die a bit closer to the goal than the player's previous attempt. 

My final focus when designing and implementing all new levels was introducing upgrades and movement modifiers. "Upgrades" and "movement modifiers" are the synonyms in this case, any upgrade the player may consume or contact that will modify the way the player is able to move. Instead of just placing upgrades/modifiers on or around the player I place them strategically throughout the scene. For example, when the wind modifiers are introduced, I simply placed one past the first set of obstacles, when the player moves to avoid the obstacles that they know are dangerous, they are forced to enter this unknown wind tunnel. Will the wind kill them? Hurt them? Move them? The player is forced to find out because the alternative is failure.

I also spent a bit of time today working on my game page and icon. I stylized Falling Short's game page by changing the theme colors and adding a banner to the top of the page. I also created and linked a short gameplay trailer, as well as creating a new game icon and screenshots for the game page.