Unable to Continue
Oh dear... Time limitations and other projects have prevented me from continuing the Green Island project. I'm afraid I will never be able to finish this in time. I guess I probably aimed far too high for my available schedule.
Day 4... Already???
It's been 4 days already but only now I found a bit of time to start a development log. I'm trying to make a prototype puzzle platform game that I'm provisionally naming "Green Island". It's simply based on a character that moves around a set of floating desert islands solving puzzles in search for the legendary Green Island.
This was my first mockup that already includes the nearly current player character. This was before the decision to move to a more desert-like scenario. Then there was the decision regarding the main character... This was not easy due to the 64x64 limitation. Here are some examples of my attempts... Initially I was looking for a "prince of persia"-like character
But this was probably too large and elaborated... I also tried a flashback-like character:
But it would take me forever to make all the animations with my very limited art skill and it is also way too big. Next, I tried a variation of a character I found in OGA with a reduced size and made a few sprites for it:
Finally, the mockup decided that to fit everything that I needed in a 64x64 window, I really could not go any more than 5 or 6 pixel high character... Hence the last variation:
Here the animations are still very very unfinished. I'm now working on those as well as some dust support for the walking and jumping. The character colors are inspired by Omar Sharif's character in Lawrence of Arabia 1962 feature film though I do not want to include any form of violence in this prototype game.
But the main palette is nearly decided and I will start building the world in the game engine very soon. By the way, I'm using Godot Engine 2.1.3... Many folks are already trying 3.0 alpha but I don't think I will have the time to learn it for this jam... Maybe the next.
My first attempts using Godot with a 64x64 window faced some issues when I tried to use screen shaders for some effects. This seems to be a known bug with some limited workarounds. Anyways, I'm sticking to simpler shaders, such as cycling the clouds and such.
And this is it for now...
update... Added death by falling, respawning and some dust animations to support walking and jumping. Sorry for the mouse at the end...
Day 6:
Unfortunately, I've had way too many things to do that prevented me from devoting the proper amount of time to Green Island. For this reason there have been very few updates and I am starting to fear that I will not be able to produce a half-decent prototype of this game. Nonetheless, I will keep trying produce a few things towards the final idea.
I've been trying to introduce some active assets. In particular, the character will need to use a ropeway between islands. So I started making a simple one based on long ago ski trips. I'm still having serious problems with physics whilst the player is on the ropecar but I don't think I will have the time to solve them in time. I also added some particles that move according to a randomly set wind variable, just to complement the environment. Not sure if they really work... I guess I have to let it sit for a while until deciding to keep them or not.
Finally... I'm looking for puzzles that I can implement on to the game. Since I'm now visiting my parents, I found this old book in my dad's library on the "Art of Wasting Time". Sorry about the portuguese title: "A Arte the Perder Tempo". Anyway... I found a few very simple logical puzzles that can be incorporated into games. So I'm going to try to use one or two of them.
Update:
To rain or not to rain?... This is my question. I have been thinking of using a rain effect I made for Godot some time ago. It works well at a (not much) higher resolution, as can be seen below.
However, the effect is not the same at 64x64. So... I'm trying to decide to use it or not. The whole idea of the game is to find the "Green Island", which is bathed by rain.
For details on the effect... It is based on the Godot infinite bubbles demo, adding collision to the bubbles. The rain drops are spritesheets, which run when starting, dropping, and/or hitting something. The scene is then composed by setting a series of collision polygons where the rain is generated and terminated without collisions as well as polygons to define the collision areas. If you are curious, you can find the details here: https://github.com/securas/raindemo
