This week the main focus was on the environment of the Forest, which is what most of our game will consist of. So let’s take a look at that.
Art
These are the tiles for our forest that Nina made, and a little sample room that shows them off.
We’ve also got the dialogue sprites for our Mayor:
Programming
Programming this week has been a lot of backend stuff. To facilitate map building, Collin divided our maps into 4 layers. (They were originally just one)
Each layer is an array of integers that pull from the forest tileset.
Base is used for the floor, Wall is used for anything that cannot be walked through, Deco is used for the floor leaves, that are layered on top of the base tiles, and Canopy is a layer that is drawn on top of the player’s sprite, so we can do things like secret passages that are covered, or have house awnings that the player walk’s under.
This gif shows our combat system in progress. In our current version of the system, combat is turn-based, but is represented on a map filled with “nodes” that represent attacks or defenses. The player selects a path shape on the left, and then uses the crank to angle that path, and assemble a route through the map, picking up nodes along the way.
This week Derek continued the implementation of this system, and in particular he optimized the way those dotted lines are drawn, as they previously had a heavy impact on performance.
In this new implementation, the dotted lines are made up of line segments that are offset from each other, as opposed to drawing a line that is interrupted at intervals.