The usual way to make platforming games a bit more interesting, via the creation of specific platforming types, or stage hazards that ask the player to do a bit more than just jump from point A to point B, just doesn't work, when you've built a movement system, that enables the players to just dash past everything while laughing about the level designer's feeble attempts at stopping them.
It's a lesson that seems obvious, but that took me a bit to understand with Virtue's Heaven, because the "built a stage around a specific platforming gimmick" approach was deeply ingrained in me.
I had no idea how to work around this, so I stopped building levels this way and instead tried to focus more on specific enemy encounters and building interesting combat spaces.
That is until this week, where I realised that instead of using these gimmicks as means to create platforming challenges, I could instead use them to change the space around them.
More on that below the cut, but in the meantime, why don't you go and put Virtue's Heaven on your Steam Wishlist?
Let's take these timed platforms, that you need to activate via hitting a generator as an example:
Here's how an area I just finished for the game looks like without you activating these platforms:
The platforms are used for two different purposes
There's not a ton of space for you to securely land and those that do exist are also occupied by enemies. Sure, you can stay in the air for an unlimited amount of time, if you know what you're doing, but one mistake and you're in trouble. However hitting the generator gives you much more space to securely land and plan your approach.
But what if you just dash past the whole thing? Well, for that "stay in the air forever" thing to work, you need to chain a dash-attack into a double jump (which is also an attack) and you can see towards the end of the gif that there's a generator placed on the ceiling, right before a set of timed platforms. It's very likely that you will hit this generator, when you're just flying over everything and once you did that, those platforms activate and force you to the ground.
Here's what this same section looks like with the platforms active:
So on one hand, you're much safer, because most spikes are covered by platforms, but you also forced closer to the ground, which makes it more likely that you actually have to engage the placed enemies in some way.
You won't find any of these special platforms in the regular area of the game, because I actually don't want to make those very complicated. They were alway meant for the special areas you have to complete, in order to free one of your friends from prison and for a long time I was struggling to distinguish those from the game's regular areas. Now that's not a problem anymore and in that process I also understood more about the toolset I have here.
It's still a very long way until this game's done, but over the last week, I could see more and more what it might look like once I'm there and I'm incredibly excited about it.