Today has by far been the most productive day in a while. As much as making the new tools sucked it seems having them has caused the breakthrough I was hoping for. Making new content is now very quick and easy, even when I screw up and have to redo things several times in a row.
Going down the list of things to do my first order of business was to finish off animating the player. First I had to draw some more frames for the rest of the moves the player can perform. These include jumping, dashing in all 8 directions, and a small little flip at the end of a dash. After a few iterations I had something that looked like this.
These were then composed into sprites and had animation sequences written for them. After which is was time to write an actual animation controller for the player. This took the form of a simple state machine that runs at the start of each update. While getting the animations up a running I also ended up tweaking the dash a bit as it was very short which didn't let you see the animation for it at all. It's now been made somewhat slower. Now almost all of the animations for the player are finished. The only one left requires some enemies to interact with.
So the next item on the list was the make some basic enemies. First I made some new tiles based on the enemies I drew in a small sketch a while back. I then gave the floating one a small animation to make it hover up and down slightly. I wrote a small function to spawn them into the game to test out and now the game looks like this.
And with a small tweak to the editor and the screen loading function I can now place these anywhere in the level. Still some work to do however. The player and enemies need to interact with each other, and enemies should also despawn when they get scrolled far enough off screen. But it looks like those things will be dealt with tomorrow.