Day 4-
I'm using Trello. While I did start with a general schedule outline, I've had to modify it a bit to adjust to the scope. Time and time again I've been told that video game production will take much longer than anticipated in almost all cases and I'm anticipating the unanticipated. Some ideas have been filed under future release which is a good thing as I'm being realistic as to what I NEED to be complete and what I WANT to complete.
My penmanship has never looked better
I've implemented 75% of what I've been planning for a player flashlight effect. I still need to get it to rotate based on the player's direction and possibly revisiting the actual design (as well as adding a second, much larger one) however I do feel it's looking great so far. One thing that was a challenge was considering the upper 2 layers of forestry and how that plays into the flashlight effect. At the moment I decided that the top layer will always be present however appear really dark whereas the 2nd to top will be only slightly darker and slightly transparent so the light will shine through... slightly. It'll impact some of the retro effect though not a deal breaker by any means. It's got me debating on tile transparencies again. Ultimately I'm thinking if I do implement tiles with transparent pixels vs opaque black I'll do it for a later release. The flashlight only faces down for now and stays on. Soon it'll will be user toggle-able. AND collision added to the 2nd layer tilemap (ie Fences, Tree trunks, Cliffs, rocks, etc)
Side note: ShareX, no matter what I set it to, would capture gifs no smaller than 3.5mb. Since there's a size limit of 3mb to upload here I found an only gif compression tool: https://ezgif.com/optimize
Bumping into that fence.
I made a few more tilemaps and plan on at least 2+ more. There will need to be some extra structures. It's just going to much easier when painting immense regions.
Trees, Ice, Rocks, Forestry, etc
Finally, I'm going to try to separate maps into segments that connect. While everything works fine when testing in Unity I fear that the game itself will slowdown (and perhaps crash) if there's way too many tiles loaded into it at once. I'd compare the effect to that of a top down Zelda game where the Link gets to the edge of an area and then the next area comes into view. Instead of the scene pausing and the next scene moving into view, I'd consider either a fade to black then fade back immediately, something like that. A quicker transition. I also realized that it would probably be really easy to label each of these scenes which could be called into the map view so that there can be an indicator as to where you are based on said label. (either that or I'm Youtube-tutorialing this map thing, again from Zelda)
Imagine if real life room transitions were like this?
Drawing another few tilemaps, flashlight directions, multiple scenes with transitions are the goals today.
Back to work!
- Randall