It’s been kind of a strange month for the project. I’ve made next to no progress on the task list I’ve created for the game, but I’m still largely satisfied with the work I’ve done. That is to say, I’ve been putting a lot of time in on things that it hadn’t previously occurred to me I would need, so I can’t really cross anything off a list when I get it done, but nevertheless the tasks I’ve done needed doing.
So, what are these tasks?
- Created a system to modify hue/saturation/brightness of animations, and implemented controls for this into existing particle systems and associated editors, as well as creating a similar system for modifying tileset colors
- Fixed up the detail editor to make it more flexible and easy to use, including the ability to modify multiple details at once
- Created a seeded random number generator so particle systems that use random numbers will generate consistently from one play to the next
- Created a simple collision system for particles, which can be used to make them only spawn on top of tiles or perform special behaviors when they collide with tiles
- Added the ability to have particle behaviors that only trigger once on spawn rather than updating continuously
- Collision improvements and implementation of water tiles and combination platform/slope tiles
- Fixed the way perspective is calculated on details to center the vanishing point rather than have it locked to the upper left
- Stripped out a non-functional zoom in/out system in favor of a much simpler one that actually works
On top of that I’ve been building levels out, which is on the list but also takes a long time to make progress on. It’s really difficult to say much about the process of building levels, because 90% of it is just spent on making sure tile boundaries line up and making tiny aesthetic tweaks. In that way it’s a lot like working on the animations after I created prototype animations: All of the concept is mostly there, I just need to elevate it to finished quality.
I’m getting close to the end of my ad-hoc list of unexpected and unscheduled problems/improvements, so I ought to be getting back to the game schedule soon. Worst case scenario is I’m a month behind of where I wanted to be: Best case scenario is that I end up making up the time I lost by leveraging some of the improvements I’ve made. We’ll see. In any case, I’m probably going to be spending the coming month or two getting early-game enemies fully animated and operational. The first couple of enemies will be the most difficult by far, I believe – after those are complete I should be able to copy and paste from them for almost everything I’ll ever need an enemy to do.