Well, uhh. I've made several attempts at this project's theme, usually with some odd-ball mechanic/gimmick over the past year or so. This time, I've decided to keep it simple and familiar with the mechanics and put my focus into the artwork. Before, when I was working on hand-drawn levels on another project, I'd spend A LOT of time on each level that the player would only see for a few minutes, at most. This time I've decided to try a thing I call the "Where's Waldo" effect. The art in where's waldo isn't exactly top-notch but there's so much to look at to keep your eyes filled. So, individually, the things that make up the scenery aren't that great but hopefully it's good to see collectively.
Where I'm at!
I have the physics how I want them and it's set up to where the code is shared between both enemies and the psychopomp. So, if I decide to continue this, making new enemies is a breeze. I've kept some of the more complicated features (slopes with alternating up hill/down hill physics, moving platforms, one-way platforms, one-way walls, etc) out due to time constraints, though, I don't feel I really need anything over the top.
All the graphics I'll be using are (FINALLY) in and optimized in the best way I could. The texture pages are the biggest available (8192x8192), but I have it set up where the gpu will only need to swap between two tpages at a time. BUT the game will probably not be able to run on lower end systems. For example, it runs fine on an nvidia g10 512mb gfx card (which is a 2007 model, I think) but it runs horribly on my thinkpad x201. I started off trying to do everything in vector, since even mobile cpus are pretty beastly, however that failed so here we are.
I still need to populate areas with enemies and puzzles and pickups. I have a boss that I animated and hope to have programmed by the end. I have no dialogue system in place as of right now. The intro "video" is a mess, so that needs attention.
So, here's some of the characters
And the gameplay I have so far
Thanks for peeking!
Dialogue Update!
So, I realized that I never did a dialogue system in GMS so this was kind of new to me. I made a dialogue box tileset last month and even programmed a shader to handle the box sizing and sprite-based text overlay in week one of the jam BUT, while I should have went to bed, I stayed up and made a weirdo smokey particle-based speech bubble instead. It's a mess, but I think I'm going to refine it some and go with the unoptimized "outside the box" (literally) approach and continue with this epiphany based out of sleep deprivation :D
Time's running out so, I'm not sure how well this is going to turn out but here's the early result, starting with the shopkeeper.