A couple of characters I don't draw enough. The snake griffin thing is named Ni, and the elf-looking lady is a fairy by the name of Molly. They're an odd duo, but they're pretty much inseparable.
So over the course of making the first version of The Middlegrounds, I learned more than a few things. But I probably wouldn't do much differently.
I first started to play around with Puzzlescript because I liked the idea of HTML5 games - Love2D was a pretty fun venture, but it felt like it wasn't going anywhere fast due to being a huge pain to export.
I think puzzlescript has a kind of perverse appeal for giving you the opportunity to create something way too complicated for the engine's intentions.
With Middlegrounds I certainly did that.
I think I worked around the limitations of the engine pretty well; the colour scheme is fairly distinct, the characters are reasonably varied and contextual controls work pretty well. There is some slowdown with the way that water is handled - its pretty hard to limit the amount of times the rules to animate it are called - but the nature of puzzlescript means that the player will barely notice the wait unless they are playing on a potato.
I think working out the scripting issues made me a stronger coder in general - so that I will probably be able to handle future problems a little easier. In a lot of places I had to figure out which checks would stop what, and how I could use those checks in the context of Puzzlescript's logic.
Where I think my real lessons were learned, is in the field of paring back an idea. My original plan was to make a gameworld more the size and grandness of the original Zelda - but as my schedule narrowed I had to cut things back everywhere.
The game world is probably a third the size now of what I had originally intended - which I think is a bit disappointing for the sake of the final sort of obstacle.What was originally to be a kind of mystery that is unravelled over the course of a longer adventure became more the sole obvious objective.
In some respects I am glad - I don't think the world I had originally laid out would have worked in Puzzlescript. The limitations on the map system, the fact that in order to process water as I do now would probably crash the game, difficulties with implementing certain entity behaviours - it seems like if I want to make the game I had in mind, I would need to look at a new framework.
If there was any interest, I would like to - what do you think?
