Gallery

11.29PM, Monday, 1 October 2012

New Mini-feature: Gallery
I was woken up rather early due to call pertaining my internship in three weeks' time. It felt like I had barely slept before I was woken. I went on to create a Gallery to view the backgrounds in the game. I went to draw a "locked" screen background for anything that has been locked.

The chains look too squarish, which became a problem when I started duplicating them. I thought of creating a currency system where you can use "keys" to purchase the unlockable backgrounds, but I don't think I have time to do that. I'll focus on getting the other important aspects of the game done first, since Gallery was never something I planned to put in the game anyway. I added buttons to navigate left and right and a number at the bottom to show which background the player is currently looking at. I plan to have 20 unlockable backgrounds. (These backgrounds don't do anything, they are just for viewing the artwork in the game). I created this feature because the backgrounds are blocked in the game and it was quite a waste of my work frankly haha, so this will put those pictures to good use.

Portal Variations
I also did colour variation of the portals. I have currently only implemented them in the Level Selection screen, so the normal stages still have the old portals. The colours might need some tweaking.

 Menu Buttons Redrawn

I also went to redraw the main menu buttons.

There were three things that I and Li Hao did not like about the buttons.
1) The text looks quite awkward.
2) When hovered over, the glow looks terrible (Li Hao didn't like how the text looks more blur)
3) I personally didn't like the image of the button being pressed - it rotated 3D which though cool on its own, isn't what a button should do.

You can see a stark contrast between the old buttons and the new buttons when placed next to each other.
The new buttons have a texture to enhance it. Previously the center of the button is just a flat colour. I did that in powerpoint way before I had Photoshop, so with Photoshop now, I am beginning to touch up whatever I can. I also removed the 3D effects. The rollover and pressed down graphics were changed. The new buttons look fabulous. OH! You can also notice the addition of the new "Gallery" button which is part of the feature mentioned earlier. The placements and order of the buttons aren't finalized, just so you know that "Gallery" isn't intentionally put on top of "Play".

Platform Tile Revamps?
I also worked on revamping the current tile graphics. They don't look so bad to me, but I suppose I should try to enhance it. Unfortunately I did not have much luck with the tiles. Instead, I ended up drawing several rocks and stones.

Transiting from Paint to Photoshop
For this and the following week, I will be cleaning up my art assets. Because I had done much of my work in Paint, which doesn't support transparency when images are saved, I end up having objects with opaque backgrounds. This became particularly annoying recently when I began replacing the old flat coloured backgrounds with actual backgrounds. See the picture below to get a better idea of what I mean.

He doesn't actually have a speech bubble in the game

THIS. Also note that the turtle has a gray square around him. That's not an aura. That's the non-transparency issue which I have with many of my assets now. This is a tedious job going through my assets a second time, but it's a job I have got to do!

I also managed to re-add the ability to click on portals in the level selection stage. I had disabled it yesterday to test the new portals and also due to a problem with lack of transparency with the sprites that determine the click-able area attached to each portal. I also extended the click-able area of portals because portals now sink into the ground partially, and the click-able area has to expand downward accordingly.