Day 2 -
Not as productive as I would have liked however I recognize that any movement is movement forward.
I spent an hour or so in Unity trying to figure out some Tilemap stuff, most of which was just me scouring the internet and reading the manual solving a dilemma about tile size. The gist of it is that I am using 8x16 pixel tiles however nothing is spelled out to indicate how to make them snap to the grid that way. Every time I tried selecting multiple tiles then drawing them in they'd do this weird overlapping thing. It turns out that when creating the Tilemap object you have to select the parent Grid and edit the dimensions of that. I was stuck on the Tilemap child forever getting nowhere!
Scale X1 - Y2 - Z1
On the plus side I did learn how to properly do the rest of the tilemap stuff in Unity and have some rudimentary basic knowledge of how to approach the rules so drawing in stuff is much easier. It does take quite awhile though slicing a tall sheet into 8x16 tiles. I have an i7 with 8GB DDR3 and a Geforce 1050ti and still I clocked it in at roughly 3 minutes. I'll continue to use Tiled to develop the actual sheets however that actual map drawing seems much easier to stick with the Unity editor, and saves a step.
After that I continued writing extra notes and fine tuning my schedule a bit in Trello. I'm aiming to get the essentials completed first so that I'm "safe" in releasing a complete project by the due date. There are tons of things I'd love to add though many of them will probably have to wait until post release. That being said, I STILL want a game that'll be fun even in an infancy state. In my notebook I prioritized what needs to get done, what seems reasonable to get done, and what I absolutely will have to wait on.
When I went back into Tiled I was beginning to create a spritesheet for characters. Who knew, with the limitations of Codepage 437 characters, how much trouble it could be when trying to create character walk animations?! Since I've never actually done them before I went on the web to research it, downloaded something to use as an example. and I mostly got somewhere, however I may just have to leave it for the moment and revisit it shortly. I'm about 80% okay with what I've done so far and have at least established a working design for the Player. It's side profile instead of 3/4 overhead. Maybe I'll use 2 Player designs for different parts of the game? Sorta looks like the men's room sign. I'll probably just have to add colors?
Not too bad. Debating on the amount of animation frames though.
I'm carving out pockets of time for this week balancing it between the dayjob and hanging with my kids. Luckily my oldest son is super into this stuff and wants to help me, and the youngest is also interested in play testing. I'm certain this will help a lot!
-Randall