The Floor is Lava!

Hello,

So something I've been working on this week is adding "Trap Tiles" to Jungle.com. These are floor tiles that can live underneath other objects and hurt the player when she walks over them.

Since I'm working with placeholder art for the time being, I made my trap tiles by recoloring the normal floor tile with a red tint and pretending it's lava. The floor is lava!

One goal of the lava tiles is to give the player another reason to use the "scooter" item. The scooter was originally envisioned to allow the player to escape tigers by moving really quickly. Unfortunately, the way the game evolved, the levels ended up being too densely packed with walls for the scooter to ever be particularly useful.

That's why, if the player manages to walk over the lava tiles at high speed (either by using the scooter or via some other method), she won't take damage from the lava.

I'll probably make some level generation templates with big lava paths for the player zip over on scooters.

Of course, scooters aren't the only way to traverse lava. Since one of the primary actions in the game is lifting and moving items around, I thought it would be fun if the player could build "Bridges" across lava tiles. The placeholder item I chose to represent these bridges are these poorly drawn "Rugs".

Now I know rugs would burn up in the lava just the same as the player, but I've been thinking of it as not real lava anyways. More "the floor is lava" kind of lava. Anyways, I'll have to figure out what lava and rugs actually are eventually. Meanwhile, rugs totally make sweet lava bridges.

Except the player is almost invisible whoops

Now here's another fun thing about lava tiles. When a tiger is in patrol mode, it will avoid lava like any other reasonable mammal.

However, when a tiger is chasing the player...

As you can see, all bets are off. I like adding ways for the player to trick enemies into hurting themselves or looking dumb, so this was a fun addition.

Anyways, that's all I've got for lava tiles for now. I'll be making level generation templates with them soon so I can play with them in the game properly and see how they feel.

Thanks for reading!