Decorations!

9 October 2012 - Decorations!

Over the past week, I had been creating several decorations that I thought could be used to beautify and visually enhance the map so the platforms and tiles don't seem so monotonous.

These are some of the decorations that were created. The black line marks the 32 pixels in height. I made most short trees and bushes cap at a height of 32 pixels  which is necessary because that is the width and height of one tile. Taller trees go up to 64 pixels and are two grids tall in height. All decorations adhere to the heights I set.

I placed the background behind so I can create decorations that more or less fit into the background. Or else I might end up getting something like this:

I was playing with the colours of the decorations. The decorations in the above screenshot has largely exaggerated colours. I got some pretty cool ideas along the way, such as a map with autumn when I adjusted the leaves to red. It was really fun playing with the colours while trying to match them to the background. There was also the problem of the decorations having insufficient contrast with the background, especially when everything is so green in this background.

The decorations were manually dragged in from a file containing all the decorations. I also need to tweak the decorations after testing the levels again in case the decorations are "floating" above the grass when I inspect them on a high zoom level.

I hope to improve the decorations if I have the time to.

Rocks
The latest new feature is the ability to throw rocks. Toward the end of the day, I decided to work on this feature. Rocks can now get rid of enemies, and destroy spikes. I also fixed a bug where the rocks were invisible (so basically enemies and spikes were disappearing for no reason before that). They can also destroy tiles! Bugs arose of course - with the wrong tiles being deleted, but I have managed to fix all the bugs in the feature surprisingly quickly.

I also generated a mini-game idea based on the ability to throw rocks. It is a very ambitious mini-game though, so I might end up not doing it.

Keys
I drew new frames for the key object in the game, effectively doubling the number of frames to make it look like they spin 360 degrees instead of the previous 180 degrees. They now spin more realistically than before.