13-20April UI Changes / New BG / New Levels possibility

13 April to 20 April

From now on, I'm going to consolidate my progress on the game from a week to a single weekly/fortnightly posts that I will edit and add on, rather than creating a new post daily as I don't want to flood the place.

The game is currently at 50 levels, with one ending.

UI Changes

- Tried wooden buttons
- Added ability to change difficulty from a level
- TOKEN FEATURE COMPLETED
- Tokens now show on the UI
- Tokens can be clicked on and used in a level and can skip an entire level

Here is a screenshot of what happens when you click the respective buttons. UI consists of placeholders.

As an update though, I'm going to change the UI. I guess there's just too much clutter as seen below.

The only consolation I have to a whole day of wasted work is that I had used placeholder graphics.

NEW Game Backgrounds
With my newly acquired skills with Photoshop, I went back to one of the less prominent backgrounds, the Reminiscence, and redid the hills. The new background is much sharper and looks better.

I completely overhauled the dark forest background. The new background was did in higher res, so it looks much more clearer and detailed. It also looks pretty good and much better than the old one.

All in all the backgrounds are better looking. I'm proud of the forest one.

Door Graphics REVAMPED
I received plenty of critique about my graphics not fitting very well with the theme of the game, such as doors, keys and blocks being too "futuristic" for what is the theme of the game. I went to revamp my door graphics as I sourced for inspiration. One inspiration was Braid, an amazing Platformer game with fantastic art. It's not a flash game though, but it's positive motivation for me to better my art.

I put the old and new door graphics together in the above screenshot so you can see the difference.

Levels 51 ~ 60 ?
A late night discussion with Li Hao has given me the greenlight to work on the next and final ten levels of the game. A rework of the ending has also given me a clearer path of what direction the game will take from here.

Testing of new feature + Double platforming
Here, I test the implementation of two types of platforms and it seems to work smoothly. This is for an upcoming new feature I am adding to the game, the ability to destroy tiles! Seen here are two types of tiles: Indestructible (blue) and Destroyable (grass). The blue tiles were placeholders for ...

New Platforms!
I tested my new tiles with an existing level. It looks awesome!

The tiles have undergone several changes before its final form. Those are previous versions. The final version will look better (hopefully).

The new background has also been drawn, consisting of a few buildings. As with all my new backgrounds, it has 4 layers of pictures for parallax scrolling.

Easy Mode implementation!
The game now has several levels being manually easy-fied, for the EASY mode. This is to allow weaker players to advance through the game. There is no easy workaround this, so it is an extremely painful process of going through the tougher levels and see what tough elements can be reduced or removed completely.

Levels 51, 52, 54, 55, 56 Created
I created new levels and many of them have special effects that are unique to that level only.

Rain particle effects
I originally drew and animated rain, but I'm trying to use particles to do that now. The animated rain looks nicer, but the animation is fake. The particles seem to be more realistic, but it just looks weird.

It looks like snow...

Decorations
Finally spent awhile decorating levels 40 to 50! Level 50 has an additional feature where I played with the layers of decorations. I also decided to make decorations a little interesting for level 49. One side of the map is decorated with red/brighter coloured flowers, whereas the other side of the map is coloured with blue/darker coloured flowers. I was thinking of making the right side be "darker" to reflect the guy turtle's personality whereas the girl, being more cheerful and bright, will have lighter coloured decorations...

On a side note, Flash Develop failed to compile my game as it hit the memory limit. Again.

It was increased from 312 to 512MB just two weeks ago. But the addition of these new decorations as well as my new backgrounds, the memory limit has been quickly reached again. This is worrying. The art assets are getting kind of heavy...
Currently, there are about 600 pictures in my image resources folder, and probably 100 more in 'decorations'.

I tried PNGGauntlet to compress one of my backgrounds. Its size decreased by 34%.
I then tried TinyPNG to compress the same background. Its size decreased by 68%, but a degrade in quality is noticeable on 400% zoom, which the game allows. It's a tough decision to make of quality vs file size.


Level Editor Improvements
Now, there are 5 save game slots for the Level Editor.
The levels can now be accessed and loaded from the level selection screen. If there is no level in the save file, the player is brought to the level editor to create a new level.

Minor Improvements & Changes
Enemies' speech bubbles slightly translucent now so it does not obstruct view
Level 9 has a secret conversation that exchanges between two 'intelligent' enemies
Achievements room has a secret wall
Level 50 has a secret area
Spikes graphics no longer have a black outline
Level selection state tiles greatly improved!

Notice also the Easy Normal and Hard button graphics were later changed as well, as well as the popup graphics, to match with the new look of the buttons.

20 April Results
62 Completed levels + 2 Additional special levels
2 Working endings