Les cages

Délivrer des animaux dans des cages, c'est tout à fait dans les attributions d'un héro tout rond tel que Bilou ... Le fait de les délivrer, ça justifie qu'ils soient disposés à aider Bilou malgré la difficulté apparente, et ça donne des combinaisons clé/serrures pour le level design. 

Mais une question restait sans réponse: "qui les a mis en cage" ? Et qu'est-ce qui a pu motiver ça. C'est pas comme si on avait un Bowser dans l'univers du jeu ... J'ai posé la question à J.L.N en fin de promenade, et il m'a proposé une cage-à-pattes qui court derrière les oiseaux pour les enfermer. Sympathique assurément, mais d'un point de vue game design, ça pose plus de question que ça n'en résout ... mais ça m'a inspiré une variante des berry-bats qu'on pourrait baptiser cage-berries, une sorte de plante pirhana qui ont la dent longue.

So, there shall be mountain peaks and gaps in-between. There shall be ropes that Bilou can hang to. That last part has became almost a mandatory part of platforming since Rayman Origins (or even New Super Mario Bros ? ). So at some point, I figured out that I could replace the need for "wide floating things" by "ropes carried by two round-shaped birds".

That sounds like a nice gameplay idea, so I wanted to extended with key-and-locks mechanics with caged birds. And unfortunately that got me trapped into a design pitfall: how did they got trapped into cages ?

I know, the question is fairly irrelevant in terms of gameplay: when you knock a question block in Mario, you don't worry about who has been placing coins in there and why. But it turns out I do when it's my own world. And since I've long decided that there is no global invasion army in Bilou's Adventure, I don't have any off-the-shelf baddies that could have captured all the helpful birds.

Hopefully, when I asked J.L.N about it, he suggested some legged-cage that would have caught them on its own. Something reminiscent of legged-chests in recent platformers, I guess. That might have worked, but that triggers other game design questions like "how fast should it run away", "can it leap over small gaps", which I'd rather not address because all I truly need is a cage to lock the bird in it.

His suggestion did inspire me sort of giant berries with fangs that locks the bird in. It's not moving much as the berry is still on its vine, but it could move enough to make animation interesting. It integrates quite well with the return-of-the-berrybats already envisioned for Peaks Zone. I could give it a frog-tongue to catch back birds if we stay too close ... and above all that, J.L.N likes it ;)