Day 4
Today was my first day of classes this semester (I have Mondays off). Because of this, I didn't get a whole lot done, but I feel like what I did get done was really important to the feel of the game.
For example, the game now has a title screen!
This is actually just an image I made in photoshop and now have set as a background to a title scene in-game, but when the player presses enter the screen fades and the first of my debug rooms appears! I'm hoping to mess around with this title screen a bit more later on, adding some fancy animations and some more visual interest to its background.
In addition to the title screen, transitions between scenes now look like they would in Metroid or the original Zelda (and other classic games, I'm sure). I think this does a lot to make the game feel more like a Metroidvania. :>
This took me awhile to nail down because when I initially programmed it I had a couple of my values mixed up and couldn't figure out what was wrong. But now it works! Yay! Unlike the transition yesterday, now a new instance of Mari's actor is created when she enters a scene. I'm currently working on a scene behavior that will allow me to easily copy these kind of scene changes to new rooms. I'm hoping I can finish that tomorrow.
I've also been slowly working on Mari's walking animation (at about the rate of one frame a day haha). I'm not completely happy with it, and I think this might be because of the angle that Mari faces the camera. If the player saw her at a side-view I think it might be easier to communicate walking. That said, I do like her current three-quarters angle, so... If any pixel artists have any advice about how to make this work, I'm all ears! Otherwise I think I might just keep the current sprite as an idle animation and make adjustments for the rest.
As always, thank you for reading!