Day 2!
A lot of things happened, then un-happened, then happened again. Let's see what happened today!
We have frog! This little fella will be the playable character in our game. He has no animations (yet), but he does flip his sprite if you decide to move the other way.
I was well underway with the random platform generation, before I found out that Unity introduced an entire tiling system in its 2017.2 update. It's a lot nicer to work with and a lot less guesswork, so I threw my old algorithm out of the window and decided to get cracking on making the levels using a tilemap.
This is the tilemap for the platforms of the game. They are white and gray for a reason; that way they can be easily recolored within Unity to quickly and dynamically create differently themed rooms, while still maintaining a consistent color palette throughout the room. Bonus smiley, since I had a tile left in Aseprite anyway.
Using a very good Unity tutorial on map generation using the Tilemap system, I implemented the Random Walk Top Smoothed algorithm to generate the maps instead of the messy old system I was using. This ensures maps are a consistent width, and also includes seeding which might allow for level sharing in the future. This algorithm also makes sure that there are way smaller differences between platforms, making for a more consistent user experience.
Plans for day 3:
- Create an end platform, that consistently ends up at the same level as the topmost tile in the last room
- Apply the tilemap to the randomly generated level, adding corners and decoration where necessary
- Allow the algorithm to make one- or two-tile pits so that there is environmental danger in the level
- Get started on the actual map rather than messing around in the testing area
- Also includes spriting backgrounds and warps
- The main menu will most likely also be a "level", though one that you can't return to once you start a run