The game has gone through several changes since the start of the polishing stage, and is starting to look much better! I improved the art of the starting levels and there are also some design changes that were made, with help from David. Most importantly, the text is now looking waaaaaay better than before!
New Font for game text
The first thing that had to go if this game were to look good was the default Font. I added 9 fonts in the game and added hotkeys F1 ~ F9 to change the fonts, to directly see which fonts look best in the game, while playing in real time. I, David and Li Hao all had different opinions on which font looks the best, which makes it confusing haha.
But with the font change, the game looks presentable. I was so excited about this change!
Text change
The text for the first few levels was also rewritten. Woohoo!
Game Logo
I changed the shape of the logo and made it look a bit better. But it might still have to change in the future. You can see the new logo in Cliffhangar3.png below.
New Introduction Cutscene
I was really tired of working on the game at one point. I used to draw random turtle pictures, and I realise how fun it was to draw random things, so I drew a turtle staring at the moon, under the tree.
With some ideas and tweaking, I got ambitious and turned this into an actual cutscene in the game! Guess I didn't waste too much time on random drawings after all.
Cliffhangar3.png
New Decorations and Tiles for Hills of Reminiscence
I drew new tiles, and experimented with colors for awhile before finally getting something that looks better. I was told that this still needs improvement though, and I wish I knew how to draw better rock tessellations. Also, this is probably the last time you can see the old font in the game in the screenshot:
The old level looked like this, and Li Hao probably fainted when he saw this:
And here is an even earlier version, but isn't the oldest though:
Finalized new turtle sprites
I finished drawing the turtle sprites some time ago, after experiencing issues with trying to make my turtles look consistent. It's so much harder to draw turtles for a game than to actually draw them for pictures/cutscenes!
The male turtle now has 5 different forms, or "levels" as David likes to call it.
Baby: 16 x 32px (turtle in an egg)
Small: 10 x 20px (default)
Normal: 16 x 32px
Large: 20 x 40px
Largest: 24 x 48px
There is actually a final form, but this was removed.
Super large: 128 x 256px
The problem I had with scaling the turtles was that they had undesirable pixelation. Drawing multiple sprites minimizes the issue, but doesn't actually solve it completely sadly. Li Hao helped me with coding another method to scale the turtle, but it does not work well with pixel sprites. The scaling was a nightmare... and drawing so many turtles is certainly exhausting.
