Lighting system is basically completely implemented but I haven’t created the entities to test it out yet. I’ll get to it at some point here, but it’s kind of a low priority. I fixed all of the bugs that resulted from changing the resolution (well, all of the ones I’ve noticed so far I guess), and a few more that have been floating around that I made note of previously. This didn’t result in nearly the framerate improvement I’d expected, but it still feels smoother and I think has a more distinctive look to it now, plus it will be, as mentioned previously, a lot easier to create art for this resolution.
Speaking of which, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. It took me a little while to find a program that worked for me, since I needed solid support for both transparency and animation, but I eventually settled on Aseprite, a pretty excellent little pixel art editor. The interface feels a bit glitchy, but no mistakes come out of that that I can’t immediately undo, and other than that it seems pretty stable so far. The last few days I’ve been working on building a very basic tileset for the first area of the game. It might not look like much right now, but this is basically just planning out what each tile type is going to be and generally is going to look like before I go in and add more detail. Here’s where it’s at now:
This covers a few different terrain types. Currently these are just basic grass/dirt/stone sets done with solid colors, along with a few ropes, but as I progress I’ll be adding more and more detail, and possibly splitting these out into different sets. Now that I’m thinking about it, it would be nice to separate the ground tiles into different tilesets based on the ground type, stone, metal, grass, etcetera, so that I can easily map the tile bank into, for example, different footstep sounds. So that’s something to think about as I go forward, but for the time being this is mostly a test of concept, figuring out what all tiles I need to construct a decent looking level and how to fit those tiles into a tile sheet. Another thing to consider is that currently the tiles are all drawn onto one layer, which is drawn in front of the character: Ideally I’d like to be able to place simple background elements using tiles, but as things stand even if it looks like a background it will draw in front of the character. I may need to create two separate draw layers, and make it so, as with footsteps, certain tile sets are mapped to draw in the background while others draw in the foreground – or, possibly, I could draw the background into a separate layer completely. Dunno, I’ll just have to feel this one out as I go.
Here’s a quick test of the tiles to make sure they work, though it’s mostly still debug tiles:
There’s a number of things that are pretty obvious just from looking at this. First, I need some decent top and side tiles, while my tile sheet mostly is just corner transitions between different terrain types. Second, I need more non-collision detail tiles to add on top of flat surfaces: you can see some of these on top of the ropes, and they really add a lot of texture and life to the tile. There are also some kind of weird draw issues when it comes to non-debug tiles, since sometimes it will just draw the debug tiles instead, but that’s probably an easy fix. Anyway, I’ll keep at it until I’m satisfied with the basic tiles, at which point I may wait to detail them until I have a few more environments constructed to make sure I don’t end up barking up the wrong tree. In the meanwhile, I may want to develop a few more enemies, and there’s still plenty of debugging left to do on the collision detection and whatnot
and whatnot…
and whatnot.
thank you