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Alright, it’s Thursday again and time for a new update!
This week started with a busy Monday, where we for the first time had the chance to set up our game for playtesting. It was an experience I can tell. Big thanks to everyone who played our pre-alpha and gave us invaluable feedback, it’s been really helpful!
To try make things clear from my last post, where I might have explained everything about the tiles in a very messy way – apologies for that. I’m using three different layers for the parallax scrolling.
Every layer represents different distances from the player, so they are supposed to scroll with different speed. On each individual layer I use a few different tiles which I loop.
We have implemented the tiles with parallax scrolling and its working fine, even though I’m not completely satisfied with the result regarding the graphic aspect. It will require some more work from my side!!
Now, let’s continue to the subject. As I mentioned last week I’ve been working on the background for our game and even though this week mostly been about playtesting it’s been a pretty decent week.
I have once again been putting a lot of time into researching about the tile-system which is something that can get to my head at times, mostly because the fact that the time seems to just disappear…
While in a discussion about the tile-system with one of my fellow programmers I was recommended to check out the program called “Tiled”. This was game-changing for me in my work with the background! Mostly because it’s been hard to imagine how the tiles (painted in Photoshop) would look when in-game.
Basically what the program does is that it allows me to insert my tiles and build the levels for the game in a very easy way. It’s also nice to get a better overview of how the levels will look, without the need of a programmer that would have to spend a lot of time implementing every little thing I want to try out (like the position of certain objects as corals).
The best part is that we’re (programmers) also working on a system that will allow us to save the level created in “Tiled” and just copy the information into the game (this is hopefully ready to be tried out next week).
Of course it required some time to get somewhat used to the program, but well spent time I must say (I can really recommend this program to anyone who uses tiles for their game – go check it out if you haven’t already).
Here’s a printscreen of the different sand-tiles and the background:
The “sand-tiles” (sadly) look almost the same like last week and I haven’t really been working much on these. This is partly because we’re missing some objects in the current state of the game, so when I haven’t been researching or playtesting I’ve been sketching on new objects (Like seaweed and corals). I would love to just get those sand-tiles completed so I can get them out of my mind, but I guess everything can’t be perfect, right?
Till next week!
About Lukas Graff
2015 Graphics
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