Devlog 33 - World 3 Complete

Published: May 13, 2022

Despite struggling a bit with other stuff in my life, I managed to do some more music/charting/backdrop work in order to finish out world 3!

New Level 3-4 Backdrops

This originally used to be level 3-2 (and the first introduction of the multi-hit ghost enemies), but got bumped over to become level 3-4 because of difficulty. The backdrops for this got shifted over to level 3-3, so I needed some new background art for this level.

You might not notice it at first, but I actually reused some of the artwork from level 1-5 (City in the Rain) here, except this time the houses are darkened for a nighttime look, with a little bit of rim lighting and a gentle glow coming out of the windows. There's also a big castle in the back -- I like how that blends into the background at first but then pops into focus at the chorus when the colors shift.

Later in the stage I do a different effect where everything gets blacked out entirely except for the rim lighting and the window glows, and I like how that turned out. This whole world ended up having very dark backdrops in general so there's a lot of playing around with this sort of thing, which I think nicely contrasts all of the bright colors in world 2.

Level 3-5

This level draws a little bit of inspiration from Metal Man's stage (Mega Man 2) and/or Tinker Knight's stage (Shovel Knight) and has a bunch of (unfortunately, non-animated) gears/cogs in the background, which scroll in parallax. I have a dithered fade effect which adds some more feeling of depth, and it also turns into a light "glow" at the first chorus, which is kind of neat:

Later in the level I black out the dark backdrop colors and brighten everything else, which results in a sort of "neon" effect which is a bit characteristic of this world in general:

And I also play around with darker colors some more in this section, where the background gears are darkened:

That's it for this week, and that rounds out world 3! Overall this world unfortunately felt a little more "phoned in" than before, I think in particular levels 3-3 and 3-5 didn't feel like I was as meticulous about the music and charting as I have been in the past. I'm a little shaky on whether the difficulty curve for this world holds up well, so I may need some additional testing or tweaks on that as well. I've been tending to make songs a bit too high on the difficulty scale in general for these worlds, and I've already had to scale down the tempo of a few songs slightly to try and compensate, but you can only go so far with that. It's a tricky balance to maintain!

I'm never one to let perfect be the enemy of good, though, so things will have to sit as is for now as I move on to work on other things like world 4, which will hopefully have an entirely different vibe.

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