Achievements, New Tiles

Friday, 5 October 2012

It is already Friday. Time flies. Another week of development is about to pass. This is the fourth week by the way. I didn't write a post yesterday as I was simply too busy. But I will now cover what I've done for the past two days.

Main Menu Touch Ups
I went to redraw many elements of the background of the main menu. The log, the turtle and the box all do not have the pixelated black outlines which came with them when I drew them in Paint. I redrew the entire log and turtle. I also went to redraw the moon, even though it was still okay, I just redid it since most of the things drawn in Paint were redrawn. I also replaced the sky with new colours. The old night sky was too bluish. The brighter colours now give it sunrise setting. I recoloured the buttons as well. Even though it was not as much work as redrawing the other assets, it was still quite troublesome.

In addition, I drew some silhouettes of trees and added them to the background as a final enhancement. The new menu looks a lot better.

Achievements
I added three achievements in the game. I also made the credits page and added a few special effects which are tied to one of the achievemnets in the game.

The basement is now the official achievements room (intended to be that way).

Today I did other things.

Fog of "War"???
In one of the maze-like levels, I darkened the level and the player can only see a certain radius around him. This was supposed to be simple, but I made it a bit more complex.

That particular level is a tricky level full of turns and twists. The zoom is high and the player cannot see far. However, the closer the player gets to the exit, the further the player can see. I made the sight radius around the player increase when the player reaches certain "checkpoints" of the maze. It is kind of cool. The sight radius eventually expands to double its initial length.

The cool thing I did was also to make the camera zoom out to let the player see the entire level when he has reached the exit. The black fog will also disappear. I found it really good to implement that.

New tiles
I also created new platform tiles to be used for the pink zones. They previously use the same tiles as the blue zones. I may switch the tiles the other way around though.

I spent A LOT of time trying to redo the old tiles. I was told that the old tiles needed to change (advised to). I spent lots of time looking at other platformer games, staring at their tiles and just seeing how they made it fit with the background and the feel of the game. It really wasn't easy trying to design the tiles. I didn't succeed in the end. I could draw tiles without much problems, but making them fit in the game, be coherent with the background and such is really difficult. It's not just drawing ability, it's also having the ability to make everything feel as one. And that's not easy for me.

Here's a screenshot of one of my tile outcomes. It will be scraped though because with the background behind it, they just don't match. There were other tiles I did but they simply aren't nice, so I am not going to show them here.

Summary

These few days I have been working more on polishing the game rather than adding stuff. I am wanting to complete the already existing features in the game and touch up the graphics.