Fun fact. Player character originally looked like this. (uniform supposed to look a bit like old Star Trek uniforms)
My 4-year-old daughter was watching and said, "Give her a pinny-tail!" (her word). Then, "Give her a smaller mouth!" And, "Make her hair black!". At that point, it was basically my final sprite, and I realized she was having me make it look like her.
(The proportions and walk animation are inspired by small Mario from SMW.)
For the past two weeks, I've mostly been coding the game logic, so there wasn't anything to show. I've been filling in actual graphics the past few days, so I finally have an update to show. Here's a shot of one of the stages. There's still some placeholder art in there but it might become permanent if I run out of time. >__<
I threw an FXAA shader at it because the curved low-resolution layer looks better with it. But at this small scale you can see artifacts in high-contrast areas. If I have time, I'll have the FXAA shader's parameters adjust to the screen resolution.
So far, the art is 99% original for this project (everything except the hearts in the UI). The code is 95% original. Boilerplate and utility code has been copied from a game I've been working on in my spare time. I could see how a game jam with lenient rules like this one could go very quickly if I had some prior games to pull from. ^__^
Oh, and last night I thought I'd add a broken glass layer to the screen when you get a game over. I did a search for drawing broken glass in Gimp to get ideas about how to make it look, and this tutorial gave me the idea to take it a step further and offset the image below using a shader. I encoded offsets in the R and G channels of my glass image, and encoded black and white coloration to the cracks in the B and A channels. There's also some chromatic separation applied before the broken glass effect. 30 minute effect looks really nice!
I plan to use low resolution sprites, but I want the space station to be a torus, so each rectangular room should look rounded. To solve this problem, I wrote a shader that curves the input UV's, and a CurvedViewport class that applies the same mapping to the input touch coordinates. As long as the curvature isn't too extreme, it looks close enough to represent a section of the large torus.
I tried a number of simple mobile rogue-likes and dungeon-crawlers last night and got a feel for what I'd like to try. I will make it turn-based so I won't need to worry about event timing so much. There will be a grid for each screen so the camera doesn't need to scroll.
I remember when I started learning Libgdx, I read the code for Cuboc and it used a bitmap file as the level editor. I'm going to try doing that for this game. If each screen is a grid, I can mix and match left, middle, and right pieces to create random stages while easily ensuring there is always a fair solution. And if I use Gimp as my level editor, I can turn layers on and off to make sure all my combinations work reasonably well together before having to play test them.
