8 JULY 2023:
- The final boss is coming along nicely! It actually looks and behaves a little differently than it did before. You can stun the left gun, the middle or the right gun individually -- and they're animated! The guns can also be damaged incrementally.
- The only downside was that the final boss graphics took about 30MB (which for QB64 QBasic is a massive amount of data to load in). So I experimented with some different methods of drawing the sprites to the screen:
This is a WHOLE image. Notice all the dead space to the right of the gun. This makes the file size for this one frame 188 KB. Not cool. The only positives to this method is that 1) I can position every image off of the same upper left coordinate and 2) No cropping/trimming required.
This is a CROPPED image. You can safely delete the dead space to the right of the gun and anything below the gun. This shrinks the file size down to 60.7 KB. Major improvement! It also benefits from making it easy to position. But some manual cropping is required to get it this way.
This is a TRIMMED image. This is when Aseprite trims all around the image so that all dead space is deleted. This shrinks the file size down to 59.6 KB. Now that doesn't sound like much, but here's a comparison of the folder sizes using the 3 different methods:
WHOLE IMAGES = 30 MB CROPPED IMAGES = 23 MB TRIMMED IMAGES = 18 MB
Trimmed images almost halve the original folder size! So clearly that's the way to go. But there is one problem with trimming images. When Aseprite trims the image, it also trims away the original position in the upper left corner. So now the individual sprite segments that make up the final boss no longer align properly.
To fix this, I took the cropped image width ( or height) and then subtracted the trimmed image width ( or height). This aligns all of the images properly.
- Now that I finally figured all this out, I can apply this same logic to other enemies in the game.
- I'm on Threads! It was really cool being able import my Instagram profile to Threads on Day 1. I plan on posting there a little more frequently than I do on Instagram and sharing my thoughts on gamedev and a few other things as well, so feel free to check it out!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
[This quote comes from Episode 75 of the Game Design Roundtable Podcast]
"If you can't make it good, make it short."
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!