Hey everyone, hope you all are having a great new year so far! It's time for another Periodic Dev Log. This update doesn't have much to it, and the process kinda sucked to implement but was totally worth it. As usual, if you don't want to read the whole post, here's the TL:DR followed by the update and what's next!
TL:DR - Redid the layout of the first level, had to resize the sprites and the grids to fit everything on the level, and fixed some little things with player movement.
Update - Oh boy, this was a rough one... So to start on a good note, I was able to get the layout for the first level worked out with obstacles and platforms. The original design didn't feel the way I wanted it to, so I reworked it on paper and things smoothed out a lot. I had one room I really didn't know what to do with, so drawing it out made a big difference. Implementing the new design went fairly well too, and I was able to fix some of the issues I had with how things were working on the back-end.
After that was all said and done, I was working on getting a background going for the level. When I went to add in some sprites I had, it turned out the grid that I was placing them on and the sprites were disproportionate. What do I mean by that? Well, the ground and the background didn't match up in terms of size. I had noticed that the ground tiles looked a bit lower resolution (they looked bigger than they were supposed to) than what I was going for, so I decided to do something that was very time consuming, but also very worth it. I cut the pixels per unit down from 64 to 32 for all of my level's sprites. What that means in simple terms is that it takes more sprites to cover the same amount of area, giving the illusion of a higher resolution game. For those unfamiliar with 2D development terms, sprites are 2D images.
In doing that, I had to redo the entire level on a new grid, since resizing the old one shrunk the grid to ~1/4 of it's original size, basically killing all of the work that I had done before for room transitions and the like. So redoing all of the sprites and the layout was all knocked out in one go. Like I said, worth it, but very very time consuming.
Besides that, there wasn't much else done besides some polish to character movement real-time with the help of my wife and a close friend. All in all things are looking really good for being just over a month into development!
What's Next - The big things I'm focusing on next are doing an update to the current GUI and the story. I'm also working on finishing off the Library level for now so I can work on some of the other stages and make some headway. We shall see how far I get, and hopefully have the first level done by the end of January!
I'm having a blast doing these Dev Logs and plan to keep doing them until the game is released. Like always, thanks for reading and have a good one!
-TJ
