Yet another Overworld redesign (and how we got there)

Greetings,
Partly as a diary for myself, partly as an announcement for whoever might be interested, I'd quickly wanted to glance over the various stages of the game's basic structure in terms of how the player goes through/access the game's levels.

The game started with the very simple idea of having several levels, in a specific order, increasing in complexity/size/difficulty. This means there was just one linear way through the game: You start at level A01, from where you'd get to A02, and so on.
Saving and loading was easy back then, because the game simply needed to save and load the current level.

The intention of the game is to make the players hunt record times / leaderboard ranks. This pretty much requires to make it possible to easily replay a level and to have a place where you can see your progress, rank and times.
I also played around with idea of having several levels belonging to one theme - basically worlds or sectors. Each sector should have it's own theme or mechanic.
It quickly became clear that some kind of overworld would be handy to make sectors and levels accessible and also to show/access times and ranks.

Overworld v1 was born:

Basically a proof of concept, the design pretty much was just another level of the game, from where you'd be able to start a sector.
The linear way of playing through the levels was still deeply integrated in the code, so the levels within each sector were still in a linear order. which means: If you'd wanted to play A03, you would have needed to play A01 and A02 first.
That's probably a bit better than before, but still not a great experience if you just wanted to hunt a new record in A06 for example.

Let me introduce Overworld v2:

From a design perspective pretty much still a regular level. I've implemented a scene-manager though, which made the linear code obsolete :-)
That enabled a new structure, where you'd be able to jump from the overworld to any unlocked sector. A sector then would be just another "mini-overworld" from which you could start any level of this sector.
The sectors as well as the overworld showed the best time of the player and the corresponding rank within the game.
From a usability perspective this was a huge improvement. But I found it quite boring to have the whole game look the same, which is why I thought about redesigning the overworld - again.

Meet Overworld v3:

One sector containing 6 levels - all in status "beaten"

This is the biggest change to the game's structure yet and as so many times before, I really underestimated the amount of effort required to make the new design work.
While Overworld v1 and v2 were pretty much just another level with some addons, Overworld v3 required A LOT of changes to the existing code.
Besides the obvious design changes that required some graphics to be created, I was met with a quite stunning amount of tasks, including:

• A completely new way of movement / controlling the player
• Entering and exiting levels need to interact with the overworld now - previously just handled by exit nodes and the main game node
• The progression system - previously just a barrier to the next sector that got removed once every level of the previous sectors was beaten - now was granular, i.e. each level unlocks specific other levels, which then are displayed differently to show they are unlocked and available; completing all levels of one sector unlocks the next sector
• There is also a visual representation for the progress on a sector and whole world level
• The savegame needed a complete rework with lots of new data to be stored such as the current level node, the status of each level and sector, also if something was JUST unlocked or if it was already unlocked, etc.
• 3 zoom levels and their controls: You can now either see the whole map, a whole sector or one specific level. Each zoom level shows a different detail of progress. For example the zoom to a level will show the level's stats (best time, rank, leaderboard rank)
• A lot of new animations and transitions needed to be created
• New sound effects

I really like the new design. It makes the game's look more varied. It also fits the space theme very well and it allows for some interesting progression visuals that I am not going to spoil at this point :-)

If you've read this far, let me know what you think about the new design.

Inv1s1ble