Space Shooter Development – Upper Floor Walls
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New week, new blog post. Last Thursday I wrote about painting the walls in a basement level of a 2D topdown game, from a frankly bizarre perspective, as shown here
Confused by what’s going on in this picture? So were most people who have seen it, and, during this Monday’s playtesting, most people who played it were no more clear, even with the context of the rest of the level (floors, space to move in and so on). So, that very afternoon, when we met to discuss the feedback we’d been given during the playtesting, we also decided to rethink the perspective of the walls to make them more easily readable, and also better-looking. In the old perspective, the dark part in the center was supposed to represent the inside/middle of the wall, and the upper and lower parts were the sides of the wall. The new perspective shows only one side of the wall, and only in walls placed horizontally on the screen. Seeing as part of this week’s sprint for me was to make a new type of wall, it provided me with a good opportunity to try this perspective out, resulting in a wall tile looking like this:
Painted in Photoshop, as per usual, although this time with liberal use of the Shift-key to ensure my brushstrokes were straight, and copypasting and flipping painted areas turnwise to keep everything symmetrical. Otherwise it’s the same old hard round brush with varying settings of transfer and shape dynamics. Making each wall sprite tile up properly was far easier with this version than last week’s ordeals, simply due to the more symmetrical nature of these walls. Like the old, now scrapped, basement walls, I also had to provide our programmers with corner versions, T intersections, and walls that simply end, so that they may put entire rooms together.
All in all, this is a screenshot of what it looks like in-game, without the darkness and various interior items our final game will include just show off all the walls (courtesty of our lovely, lovely programmers). There are still some things to polish up – for instance, right now its not entirely clear where the entrance to a room is, since nothing of the floor is currently visible. The walls have also made me re-evaluate my previous work with the floor tiles, and I’m genuinely considering re-doing them too. Them’s the breaks.  |
