DAY 8
So today was a bit of busy day in the personal life department. As such I wasn't able to get the things done I initially planned and wanted to get done. Especially since what I did get done took much more time than I originally planned.
I got up early to get to work on an idea that popped up in my head yesterday late in the evening. It was too late to start working on it so I decided to write it down and start making it a reality as first thing in the morning. Which I did. You see I suddenly got the realisation that every platformer game has it's own goal to go to or work towards. Mario has flagpoles, Sonic has rings/panels,... So in spirit of that common concept in the genre that inspired this game, and to stick with the musical theme, I decided that magical musical sheets that the player has to collect would make perfect sense in the story, world and atmosphere I'm trying to build. This idea also seemed like a perfect nod to the 3D platformer genre that eventually grew out of the original 2D genre, as I am also just as much a fan of 3D as 2D platforms. (even if I do find a certain elegance in the simplicity 2D provides) So with that in mind I got some reference pictures of musical sheets, opened Asesprite and got to work. And even if it turned out making distinguishable musical notes and a general recognisable object for the player to see and immediately understand it's purpose was a bit of challenge (that of course comes naturally when using individual pixels when making art, something I also felt while making our little protagonist). After a few hours of work on both the base sprite and animation I must admit I was really pleased with the result. But I'll let you all be the judge on if my goal of making this musical sheet's purpose clear immediately by visuals was a success.
With that sprite and animation done I got to work on adding this sprite as a new intractable object (that isn't affected by physics!) into the game world. I also quickly replaced our very boring placeholder sprite of the playable character into our new fluffy little friend.
(as usual, apologies for the low quality gifs, doesn't do full justice to the actual prototype)
And there we have it, a collectable object with almost pixel perfect collision.
Overall I didn't achieve as much as I wanted to initially achieve but I'm still pleased with what I did achieve. Having some clear in-game goal for the player to go to feels like a nice little thing added that brings me closer to the world I have envisioned in my head. As far as plans for tomorrow are concerned it'll be a very code loaded day, in contrast to these past 2 days, where I will work on coding enemy and player collision (getting hit, game over and all that). I'll also get to work on coding behaviour for when the player touches the "magical" sheet music. The goal for this demo is a simple screen transition to thanks those of you who will play this demo at the end of the jam. Of course as I flesh out this game after this jam the goal is to have end of level animations and transitions but those are all future plans for now. The focus right now is not on final polish but on a working prototype demo, as mentioned multiple times throughout this gamejam so far.
This concludes yet another day and devlog ! It might be with little steps at a time but I can slowly feel the world I envision come to life and I hope I could convey some of that over to you all so far ! Anyway, thanks for reading and have a good day/night ! See you tomorrow !