Getting Ahead of Myself?

It turns out I jumped the gun a little last week as I was advised to “finish the first level to move on…” I checked back to my time plan this morning and my goal for this week was to add UI elements like the HUD and inventory menus. These are now well under way, so I feel like I’m doing well for time, although I know in my head that this can only mean I’ve omitted to do something a long the way. Obviously, graphics are still a working progress. The reason I wanted to start placing UI elements now is because I felt the natural graphical style would be evident enough to start expanding from background assets to the other areas, like the UI, title menus etc which will start to take form over the next couple of weeks. Right now, I’m still filling out my days with level refinement and perfecting areas which have been left overlooked for a while. So that I can’t miss A SINGLE THING, I’ve started at the beginning of the level and worked my way, changing and improving on specific things as I’ve gone along.

In a lot of places, parts of the level simply needed filling out slightly. You can see some improvements to the graphics here where I’ve added little plants and bushes and filled out large plain areas with small rock details etc, so that every part of the level has a unique combination of my existing tiles and assets. What may of may not be noticeable from this image is some adjustments to the lighting which I’ve made. I’ve expanded the sprite I use for these lights so that it covers a larger area and isn’t so concentrated on a small space, which brightens up the level significantly and adds more light variation across the level.

One major addition to the tileset has been these grassy edge tiles, which droop over the edges of platforms and just round them off nicely. They make everything seem a lot more finished, and eliminate a lot of the very hard, straight edges that were causing problems before.

Another significant change has been to the lighting system inside caves. I’ve made the ambient light nearly black, which almost makes the background invisible, except where there are lights. I’ve made these lights much brighter than the outside lights as they are significantly more essential more gameplay. I think this change make the level more interesting visually as well as in terms of how the player plays the game. Instead of looking at an entire surrounding area, the player is constrained to one small space. In this image, you can also see some improvements I’ve made to the Hanging Adversary sprite, which is now finished and working very nicely.

When it came to animating the Hello Mushroom sprite, I admittedly got a little stuck. My original design didn’t give me much space to work with, and I felt like I could only accomplish very minimal movement. This would have been fine, except my other obstacles are now much more active in comparison! So, I redesigned the shape of the mushroom to be more flexible. This new mushroom still releases spores in exactly the same way as the old design, but this one now dances about a bit. The smaller mushrooms are harmless and (I think) create a nice little piece of scenery, but warn when there is a nasty mushroom around!

Rough Inventory Menu Design

Based on the designs I’ve been looking at from previous games, here’s my template design for the Hanami Inventory menu:

The window design has been greatly inspired by the simple blue menu windows in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. I’ve emphasised titles by giving them a strong background rather than using bold text. At the moment, the type face is an image which I have drawn. I’m currently using DejaVu Sans in all my development work and for the text in my HUD, but I might change this later. The typography here has been custom made to fit best into the space, so I feel that it’s the best option.

The Petal progress diagram is very rough and unfinished. This is for a feature that I haven’t implemented yet, where collecting five petals in each level will result in the collection of one full flower. This information is displayed entirely visually, like the Triforce diagram in The Legend of Zelda or the Orb collection diagram in Final Fantasy. I’ve taken a lot of layout ideas from the original Final Fantasy menu system. The only interactive parts of the menu are on the left hand side, while the right hand side contains information about items and the character. However, instead of linking to pages of lists of items, I’ve used a more visual approach similar to the one used in Harvest Moon More Friends of Mineral Town. The player can scroll through each collected item in the three available slots and see information about each on the right hand side, where there is a designated blank space for written information.

The health diagram in the right-hand column is similar to the health bar in the HUD, so that player can see which stats it correlates to. This is currently fully interactive, so when the player eats a sushi item one coin is restored to its slot.

In Game Maker, information on each item in the inventory is stored in a 2D array. This stores information about the name, description and start amount of each item (in that order!)

I have a script called itemAdd which is called every time a piece of sushi is acquired. This tells the engine to draw the correct sprite into the menu when the “S” key is pressed on the menu, ie

if global.inventory[0,2] > 0
//here, [0,2] refers to that specific information in the array

Another draw code tells the engine to draw the strings of text for name and description in its designated place on the screen. This is a general code where the figure indexing each individual item is replaced by “s”, meaning this one code will cover all instances where “s” is a figure.

The left and right keys are programmed to direct a “highlight” sprite above each slot in the inventory in order to select an item. This is simply achieved by programming an X and Y coordinate for each time the button is pressed. When an item is selected using the “X” button, this code controls the processes of restoring 1 point of health and removing the item from the menu.

To make sure the player cannot restore more than 5 points of health, I’ve programmed all figures above 5 to equal 5.

Lastly, I have a code which pauses the game by disabling all other objects and drawing a static background based on the objects on screen when the inventory was opened. This is based on a process I used for a pause menu in my last project, where I create a state called pauseon which is true when the menu is open and false when the menu is closed and the game is running.

Screenshots:



You can see the new system work in my latest Devlog Video here!

Sushi Get

Inspired be the healing properties of sushi, I’ve decided to use these various types of sushi as the health items in Hanami. Eating food to restore health in video games is quite a traditional system. For some reason, eating chicken found on the rough streets of Streets of Rage was perfectly acceptable, and in fact, good for your health. Here’s Axel, eyeing up a yummy looking apple in Streets of Rage 2:

What’s more, finding a fully cooked roast chicken in a barrel was nothing out of ordinary. It’s not really a gaming aspect that has survived, for whatever reason…

Trying to place tiny little pieces of sushi in a game where the character is only 16 pixels tall isn’t without its complications. I started off trying to draw sushi into 8×8 squares so that they wouldn’t look unnaturally out of proportion. Although proportionally this worked, I wasn’t happy with the limitation of how much detail I could put into each item.

These tiny little pieces were also very difficult to place into the game. Either they stood out immensely, mainly because of the colour differences, or they were completely lost in amongst the scenery. So, instead of having somehow healthy pieces sushi just lying around the place, I decided to give them a container. This is the equivalent to chests in adventure games, or the item boxes in games like Crash Bandicoot and Super Mario. Open the box, get an item! It’s a simple concept.

I think if you were to buy sushi in a box, it would probably be a sort of takeaway bento, which unfortunately for me isn’t very distinctive. So, for now atleast, I’ve decided to cheat with this takeaway noodle box. This is much more recognisable, and at least its contents are expected to be food… For those who recognise Japanese kanji in pixel form, I’ve managed to squeeze in the symbol for “life” onto the front of the box.

The idea is that when the player approaches the box and presses the “x” key, the box reveals its contents and that type of sushi is added to the inventory, which I’m currently in the process of making. I’ve decided to use a similar system to the one used for collecting mushrooms in Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. You can’t see it well in this image, but there is a collectable mushroom on the right hand side of this image:

In S:S&S EP, mushrooms can be found which allow the player to see spirit beings, but eating a mushroom will also restore the player’s health. When a mushroom is collected, a mushroom icon appears at the top of the screen which indicates to the player that they are now carrying a mushroom. When a second mushroom is collected, the same thing happens but a quantity is added, so the number 2 will appear next to the mushroom icon. The player can only hold three mushrooms at once, which is annoying as most of the way through the game the player has five hit points, coincidentally the same amount as Hana in Hanami.

So now I have two items, one container item which contains one sprite image of the noodle box. The other is a “sushi” item, which contains 4 16×16 subimages of the various sushi/onigiri. I’m infinitely more happy about being able to draw larger sushi sprites with that added amount of detail.

When a noodle box is acquired, one of these images is called at random to the top of the screen. This indicates to the player that they have acquired a piece of sushi from the box! Calling a random image saves me the time and pointless effort of assigning a specific subimage to each individual instance of the sushi box, but ultimately makes no difference to the player as each item has the same effect.

Looking at this screenshot now, I feel like I could perhaps create extra HUD space to act as a background for the sushi so it stands out a little more? As I currently don’t have an inventory to place the item into, the item disappears after a few seconds never to be seen again. I’ve spent a little time practising making inventory screens and think I know the system I’m going to implement. There are ultimately two methods of creating an inventory in Game Maker- one is have a designated room where all the inventory information is held, and the other is to call an inventory object which sits above the imagery on-screen. I will be using an object, as I feel this won’t interfere with persistent room settings etc. which could get quite complicated. I’m also familiar with temporarily disabling on-screen activity for pause menus, so I kind of know what I’m doing! Before I can really get started, I need an inventory design (or atleast template) which I can work to. I’ve got a few designs in mind, I just need to work out some layout issues mainly.

GUI Design

Based on yesterday’s speech bubble designs, I’ve spent today working out some other interface elements. Apart from the game’s main menu (and potentially a separate pause menu), there are two main GUI elements which will keep a consistent style throughout the game. One of these is the HUD (Heads Up Display), and the other is the game’s inventory.

The HUD

I was previously using a placeholder HUD which shows information about the amount of flowers collected and the player’s health. The reason I placed this here temporarily was mainly as a debug object for me to test when damage was being taken and how well the flower collection ds_list was working. In the finished game, the HUD will be a quick insight into level progress, showing the same information just in a nicer graphical style.

I’ve had a quick look into how other Indie developments have incorporated HUD systems and found that they tend to be very basic, using simple icons and in some cases text only. This example from Ninja Senki is a very clear way of displaying information which doesn’t get confused with any other element on screen.

So, simple is good. There doesn’t seem much point in clogging up the screen with pointless graphics unless they are meaningful or relevant. The HUD should be concise and to the point, so that the player can glance at it quickly and get a good impression of the information displayed.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has a fairly complex HUD system, but enforces clarity by using unique icons and indicators rather than using text.

Key:
The Green Bar (far left) represents special ability charge levels
The Bow Icon (left) represents the secondary item equipped
The Green Gem icon represents the amount of rupees the player has
The Bomb icon represents the amount of bombs the player has
The Arrow icon represents the amount of arrows the player has
The Heart Capsules (far right) represents the player’s hit points.

This sounds complicated to explain, but each feature is added into the game gradually, allowing the player time to get to know the HUD and where to look for info. I’ve kept this in mind whilst designing my HUD object, even though mine will only display two pieces of information! Originally, I wanted to swap my HP figure for a sliding health bar, but keep the flower icon to display info on how many flowers had been collected. Giving it some thought, I’ve moved onto a health system which is more like Zelda’s heart capsules. Because Hana will only take 5 hits before “dying”, and each obstacle deals the same amount of damage, I thought it would be more appropriate to create an image which shows each individual hit point. You can see my thought progression in the sketches I did this morning…

I’ve tried to keep the window shape and style similar to that of the speech bubbles, which will now be a consistent theme throughout the GUI. I’ve added the character profile picture partly as a way of indicating “this is player health and partly because of some advice from I found in a forum about pixel art games- A 16×16 pixel character is an extremely distorted version of a character design, and showing a higher resolution image of the character somewhere in the game acts as a little player gratuity. On the right hand side of the image you can see a rough design for a menu/inventory, where I’m thinking of using an even large character image, based on my main concept art for Hana.

The size of the “high-res” head-shot is just over 32×32 pixels, twice the size of the entire original sprite. This took an unpredicted amount of time to create, because of the increased opportunities for detail in the drawing! I wasn’t originally sure what I was going to use as a representation of a hit point, but liked the idea of using something rounded. In the end, I’ve gone for a Japanese coin look!

This now sits in place of the old HUD, the only real similarity is that I’m still using a string of text to display how many flowers have been collected.

The Inventory Menu
I haven’t managed to fully design the inventory yet, but I’ve planned out everything that should go in it! Information like:

• An even higher resolution character image
• Character health
• Health restoration items collected
• Flowers Collected
• Petals Collected
• Perhaps a little info on level (at least some indication of which level the player is currently on!)

After getting to grips with the enlarged head image that I drew earlier, I thought I’d work on the full character image first! As the menu is likely to take up the majority of the screen, I’ve created this image at a height of 100 pixels (which is scaled up to 300 when displayed in the game). This is basically a pixelated version of one of my previous sketches.

To give you an indication of size relative to the game sprite and other elements, I quickly whipped up this scary little image where I placed the new drawing into the game:

Continue

I’ve looked over the timeplan for this week and partly be mistake, my objectives are mostly the same as they were for the previous week, to achieve a “good representation of the final game.”

So, there’s still a lot of visual work to be done! There are still a whole range of tiles to be added to each tileset-nothing is finished. Over the weekend I came up with a silhouette background to fill out some of the background, which has made a huge difference to the way the game looks.

I got the idea for this style of background from some screenshots I took of the game Nevermore 3, which uses layers of distant silhouettes in its backgrounds.

In my repeated background image, I’ve created silhouette buildings, trees, statues, shrines and pagodas inspired by Japanese landscapes:

The idea is to use a darker coloured background on top of this to add a better sense of distance and break up the monochrome.

Today I advanced on some of the graphics decisions I made yesterday, starting with the background trees.

This was the initial structure that I had from yesterday’s rough test, however after looking at examples of real and drawn cherry trees I felt that it could do with some improvement. For a start, this sort of tree tends to have a lot more branches- the lack of leaves really emphasises its branches more than other trees. I painted this new design based on additions to the old one:

Before, I’d represented the tree’s blossoms as blocks of colour, but realised this wasn’t really appropriate based on the nature of the tree. The blossoms create very different shapes to leaves, and I wanted to get the texture of the tree right.

To get this right in the digital version, I took the 16×16 pixel Sakura Blossom sprite and reduced the size by half, which ultimately distorts to shape and makes it seem more abstract while keeping a lot of the colours intact. I then copied and pasted it into the design, to create a repeating pattern which looked a lot more natural and detailed than the look I was going for before.

This tree is made up of three layers: a top layer containing blossoms, a middle layer with the tree trunk and a bottom layer which contains a darkened set of blossoms to create depth within the tree.

I repeated this process with a new tree design, which I sketched out but didn’t get round to painting unfortunately. The idea is to have two contrasting designs so I can hopefully repeat these two throughout the level design without having to draw any more VERY time-consuming trees…

Some screenshots from the level:

They’re surprisingly flexible! However, not much good on their own. I’ve had to adapt the design for the Bonsai style tree to match this one, or it looked seriously out of place. I used a similar method, however I converted the colours to the Sakura Blossom sprite to look more like a leaf than a flower. Here’s the result:

My main objection to the design is that everything is currently still very murky, despite the odd light here and there. I’m thinking of increasing the span of some of the outside lights to make everything a little brighter, however for now I’ve seen a great opportunity to hang lanterns from my trees. Everything so far is still in test phases, and this is no exception! This test has resulted in light overkill, which I’ll sort out if I decide to keep this in.

Auspicious Everything

Today I started to crack down on Hanami’s background imagery, not just the background tiles which in a way make up the foreground…But the actual far-distant background that doesn’t affect gameplay in any way. So far, my background has consisted of a grey colour which has been made a murky pink colour by the ambient overlay from the lighting system.

Obviously, one hugely important feature of the background is trees. I would consider myself a failure if I made a game about cherry blossoms and didn’t include the trees that they came from. This has always been a part of my level design thoughts, and although I’ve never mentioned it, the trees were among the first elements I started to think about when developing the art style.

As a I knew I was going to be using tiles but wasn’t sure what they would look like at the time, I wanted to make sure the trees didn’t conflict with the rest of the style too much. I tried to think of ways to make trees from tiles just in case making stand-alone tree objects didn’t work. From playing around with rock features etc. I’m pretty confident in saying that wavy tree objects aren’t going to be an issue against the square shapes of the buildings and other elements.

I discovered this photo a while ago and knew I had to make trees that looked like this! They fit in very well with the style and look naturally Japanese, which helps with the consistency of the game’s themes.

I reduced the size of the image and essentially traced the shapes in Photoshop to create these tree objects.

I imported these into the Game Maker project to see what they looked like with the rest of the tiles I’d already created, and here is the result:

They fit into the landscape better than I expected, however I felt that they needed rescaling to act as background elements. The background is better off made up of fewer large objects than lots of small objects cluttering everything up. I had a similar idea for a Sakura tree this time traced from a branch as opposed to an entire tree, which never really got finished.

Auspicious Clouds

Another element that’s been a part of my designs for a while now has been this swirly cloud pattern, which I’m hoping to use for cloud platforms towards the end of the level. It’s a very Eastern cloud drawing technique, started as the auspicious cloud pattern in China and adapted by the Japanese. Anime enthusiasts may recognise a similar pattern used as the Atatsuki symbol in Naruto.
It’s the spirals that really set this design apart from the standard cloud-like patterns you tend to see in Western productions, so I started arranging drawn spirals to get these cloud shapes:

This is actually an early page from my sketchbook which I cleaned up and recycled, which is why Hana has appeared in the bottom left corner!

Because I want everything to look Japanese, including things like clouds which tend to look the same all over the world, I started working on implementing this sort of design into the background. I used the previous screenshot to draw straight onto to try out a rough version.

From this I made a cleaner version, which I attempted to shade and make consistent with the rest of the game assets. I kept the scale roughly the same, as I thought the cover from one cloud was adequate. However, in the game I felt they may be slightly too big compared with other elements such as buildings, although I won’t change anything now until I’ve added in more background. These will definitely go in though, they don’t look as though the conflict or compete with the foreground and represent a part of Japanese culture.

This kind of gives you a rough impression of how they look in the game, although for now I’ve simply repeated the designs infinitely along the X and Y axis and seem to have created a cloud overload. In this example, I’ve added a slight blur and changed the opacity of both clouds to make them seem more cloud-like.

Auspicious Trees?
You can see from the sketches I did above that while I was drawing the clouds I thought to myself “I could use this pattern for trees also…” Although this decision has been a battle in my mind all day. Yes, it works well as a tree design in theory but how well does it work in practise? I tried both designs for the bonsai tree and the sakura tree out with this auspicious leaf pattern on the mock-up screenshot:

While both designs are nice on their own, I just don’t think its appropriate for implementation into the game, as this really does create clutter and mess. As competition for the design, I created a more realistic looking Sakura tree, inspired by this lovely painting. I wasn’t sure on the scale of the tree, so I made this second design slightly smaller and compared it with the “auspicious” design in the Game Maker project. This is the comparision (minus clouds!)

Unfortunately, I felt that neither of these designs were suitable. While the more realistic design works better in union with the game’s tiles, the “auspicious” design is much better in terms of scale. So, to put any tree designs into the game I have to increase the scale. I think the height that seems to be working is about 150 pixels.

Auspicious Bushes?
I had a real lightbulb moment this morning when I drew a spiral pattern at the base of the tree and realised that I could add bushes to my level design. These won’t be spirally, but expect bushes. There is a definite lack of plant-life in my game world so far.

Auspicious Everything Else
So I now know that I will have at least two types of tree in my background, as well as possibly some bushes if these don’t get into the foreground. I’ve mentioned before that the background will probably mainly consist of mountain shapes, to look like far distant mountains. Japan is full of mountains. It’s very much a Japanese thing.

I went back to the Photoshop screenshot mock-up again and drew in some really rough mountain shapes. These fill a great amount of negative space, and work so well in creating depth.

I’ve yet to develop these any further, but getting the background down is one of my top priorities now as I’ve realised how much difference it makes to the feel of the level. I will probably create a seamless string of mountains that will be repeated across the X axis at the top of the level like this.

Weekend Catch Up!

Tying up some loose ends…

New Characters
Here are rough designs for three more characters, all with specific roles (should they make it into the game!) I’ve tried to create one unique character for each of the game’s levels, as well as recurring characters who will appear throughout restoring health and saving the game.

The idea for the purpose of Most of the characters is that they will give Hana a flower petal, which can be combined with other petals to create one flower. Five characters in each level will give Hana a petal each, which will then make a whole. I really hope I can get this to work, otherwise they will simple have to give her a whole flower that they have found (to make it easier on my lack of coding knowledge).

Left: a guy who wears a face mask to protect himself from germs, or possibly to protect others from himself. Apparently, the lovely Japanese people wear a mask when they are ill to protect others from catching the bug.

Middle: a resident of the “pink” village- the game’s first level. He is based on Tsukimi from 51 Japanese Characters, and prefers watching the moon (“tsuki”) to the flowers. He sits high up in the mountains at the end of the level.

Right: I think this guy will appear in the next level. He is found in a hot spring, hence the lack of clothing!

Old Characters
While I’ve been working mainly on level design, I’ve also been doing character pixel-art for the characters I created a while ago.

Priesty

Monky

Panda

Sleepy

I’ll give each of these characters walking and fidgety animations so that they can move. They’re all a very similar size and shape so that I can apply similar animations to all of them.

Level Developments
I’ve started jotting down ideas for the next level I’m going to create, which revolves around Japanese forest rather than the current emphasis on mountains. The colours scheme is orange, so I have a new Kanji to work with! There isn’t so much a structure as individual features at the moment.

Draw, Animate, Code & Play etc…

Drawing
Over the past couple of days I’ve tried to prioritise sorting out my environmental tiles, but still haven’t really come to a conclusion. I tried to test out my new idea for rocky tiles with real parts of the level design, but so far can’t seem to make them work well as they do on paper! To stop myself from ending up in a rut, I’ve discarded ALL rocky texture tiles for now and replaced them with a plain purple colour, which can easily be swapped for a textured tile when I decide what it will look like!

I made a little progress with the rock pattern around cave entrances however. I considered using straight edges around rock outcrops so that straight edges around other level features wouldn’t stand out so much, but didn’t feel this worked as well as the more natural, uneven design which is closer to my previous trace design.

I tried this design here with my previous rock texture, but decided that the rocks looked better against a more plain background. Even if I bring a heavily textured tileset back for platforms, I may stick with a plainer tile for cave walls.

Whilst trying to ignore all the complications of seamless tiles etc, I’ve diverted my attention to creating more Japanese-looking objects for the level. I’ve started by taking objects I’ve already made and adapting them to suit various instances, which is great for level continuity.

Amongst these smaller features I’ve been working on some large objects inspired by specific Japanese things, like this shrine gate:

and this bridge:

Although, the reason for the bridge’s funny shape is because it follows the shapes of my platform mask tiles. I may round this off later to make it look nicer and have the character follow the tiles rather than the shape of the bridge.

And I finally got round it pixelising the small food stand that I designed about a week ago. You probably can’t tell even if you’re Japanese, but I attempted to write ramen “らめん” in hiragana on the sign!

Without the ground texture tiles, the game definitely doesn’t look as “nice” as it did before, but the more empty spaces of the level are starting to fill up. (I haven’t built the lights in this screenshot either, which is why it looks so dark!)

Animating
In time for a proper working level prototype, I wanted to get many more character animations in. Before now, I’ve simply had one continuous running animation! I’ve only created the basics so far: running, stopping, jumping and climbing ladders.

To make the character stop you could use a single frame of the character just stood still, but I like to keep the character moving to ensure the player that the game is still running! Before now, I’ve used a breathing motion by making the character move slightly up and down, but where Hana is made of so few pixels, any rearrangement of pixels results in something far from “subtle”. I think a breathing animation is out of the question, unless I find a clever way to do this. For now, I’ve created a couple of frames that make her look fidgety when stood still, and a blink frame that flashes up irregularly.

For the jumping animation I’m currently only using one frame, although I would later like to add another to differentiate the character jumping up and coming back down.

My climbing animation is currently universal, used for climbing up and down ladders. This particular animation works best for climbing down ladders, so I may later add another one which looks more like climbing up a ladder.

Coding
The main bulk of the coding I’ve done over the past couple of days has been in the character step function, which controls the way the character moves. With all the new sprite sequences, I’ve had to customise things like image-scrolling speeds for each individual animation and can no longer rely on one over-ruling command.

I’ve split character movement into two separate “modes”-one fore running, jumping etc. and one for climbing. If the player is not on a ladder or in mid-air, the player is on_ground (this is a ready-made variable that comes with the Grandma Engine.) If the player is on_ground, the rules of horizontal movement apply, including sprite sequences and player input. If the player crosses a ladder but does not climb, ie. does not press up or down, then the rules of on_ground still apply.

if on_ground && place_meeting(x,y,obj_ladder) && !keyboard_check( key_up ) && !keyboard_check( key_down ) {
can_c = false; }

But, if the player crosses a ladder and does press up or down, can_c (short for can climb) becomes true, and the rules of ladder climbing apply. This code is pretty similar to the code I wrote before for vertical movement, but I’ve added sprite sequences and image-scrolling speeds. As you can see, I’ve applied the climbing animation twice, once for each vertical direction, so if I wanted to I could use two animations that would represent each direction.

else if (place_meeting(x,y,obj_ladder)) {

vspd = 0;
can_c = true; {

if (keyboard_check( key_up ))
vspd = -S_MAX_V /4;
sprite_index=spr_hana_climb;
image_speed=.1;

if (keyboard_check( key_down ))
vspd = S_MAX_V /4;
sprite_index=spr_hana_climb;
image_speed=.1;
}

I haven’t written much other than this, but I’ve added a few lines of code for more warp objects throughout the level. This has helped me create some clarity where caves are involved, as I have created two new rooms for caves that are joined to the main level by these warp points. Now you can see a definite distinction between the outside and inside of the cave parts!

Outside:

Inside:

Playing

Adding a lot of visual features doesn’t occur easily whilst play-testing, due to the fact that in Game Maker the platforms are made of these red-block objects that cover the background imagery. They need to do this so that I can see where I’ve put platforms! But at the same time, I can’t see if I’ve made a mistake with the imagery below. So when I’m editing tiles and want to see how they look in-game, I have to add these red blocks temporarily and delete them again afterwards. One major criticism of Game Maker is that it doesn’t allow bulk actions to be applied to all instances, so each block must be added and deleted individually, which is a looooong and tedious process. My main focus is still on visuals, but I’ll build the complete level for a play-test from volunteers next week.

This concludes my lengthy summary or the past two days!

More Changes to Environmental Tiles

I’m still not 100% about my mountain/rock tileset, which seems to be expanding increasinly to accomodate for varying edges and crossovers. I had a rethink and came up with a more simpler, more flexible solution. I’m going to try this out for now and not expand on it too much, as I don’t really want the graphics holding me back at this stage…

Here’s some of my most recent screenshots from the level test in Game Maker:



I’ve taken on some of the advice I’ve received from feedback sessions, such as using the blue brick tiles as a background layer to show depth within the mountain, however I’m still concerned about the scenery looking overcrowded, messy and repetitive. This is before I’ve even filled the level with many of the items/objects which will be added later. So I’ve gone back to my traced level design and doodled this new tile design, based on a much simpler and organised idea.

There are parts of my original design which clearly show just a few neatly aligned rocks jutting out, and I feel this suits the building graphics better than the more clustered tiles I was previously using. I created this test mock-up in Photoshop to check their effectiveness:

You can see that I’ve also changed the colour of the grass to match some of the colours used in the building, so the level shouldn’t seem so disjointed any more. I’m currently working on the rocks around the cave entrances, and wondering if I should create a non-tiled pattern specifically for all of these instances, although all of this still needs a little work.