Re: Adding additional islands to game ...

[David Philippi]

Am Sam, 2003-06-14 um 16.45 schrieb Stefan Dirsch:
> As currently pingus (0.6) "only" comes with a tutorial (it's
> awesome!), I would like to add one or more additional islands to the
> game using levels already playable from "levels/playable"
> directory. Is there any documentation how to achieve this or can you
> give me any hints to do so?

Well, that's been more or less the plan from the beginning. It's just
not as easy as it may seem, one has to do the following:

1. continue the story to define the setting of the next world
   (I guess it would have to be quite cold to keep it logical.)
2. Search through the levels in (un)playable for good canditates to fill
the new world, maybe adapt difficulty sometimes and likely create new
ones to get the number sufficiently high.
3. get everything tested, polished up (e.g. add nice descriptions to the
levels), call upon the translators...
4. make a new release. ;-)

> I saw the worldmap files in "worldmaps". I think I can use one of
> these for building a new island, but how can I tell pingus to continue
> with this island instead of displaying the credits after tutorial is
> finished? Is there a file to control this or must the sources be
> adjusted for this?

Doing that stuff in the source isn't that much work, if you a world with
levels I'm quite sure that either Ingo will do it or else I'll take a
look in the source and do it myself.

> BTW, what about let the user choose between playing the tutorial and
> other islands just in the beginning of the game when we have more
> islands? Just an idea ...

This would go against the idea of the story, you start you travels on
tutorial island. It's nothing unusual in my experience - you've got to
play the tutorial part of many games and in case of Pingus it's fun
anyway. ;-)
Perhaps we'll have to discuss this again much later once we've got a
larger number of worlds. On the other hand, I guess it's more likely
that then we'll get a storyline starting with tutorial island and groups
of levels with a similar difficulty.

Bye David