Useless objects for richer environment

[Germanunkol]

I started drawing some "useless objects for richer environment"...

raw/rawimages/tilesets/BackgroundObjects1.svg

However, these are not tilesets and I'm absolutely unsure of how to set them up. I wanted to treat them similar to the "windmill" image - as full images, not breaking them into tiles. So how should I go about this? And do you even want that, or just tiles?

They might still need some work before we can put them into the game. The "2-Px-Wide-Lines"-Rule was a bit hard to follow in places...

[michalove]

You successfully have blown my mind. Awesome images!!! It is okay to violate the 2px-rule for the tree. No worry. As long the final image looks consistent.

The wooden boxes (crates) made me giggle a bit, see this blog entry: http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/39.html They should stay in the game, though. Maybe we can make crates of exact size of one (or 2x2) tiles and make it possible to stand on them (like the wooden planks in the game right now).

I agree, tiling would be a lot of work. We could make a decoration object type. Or, if all images fit into one image file, we could also use some sort of sprite batch. That might be a big faster. Right know, I don't know how to do this most efficiently, in terms of work flow. The Tiled mapeditor allows for objects, that are not tile based, but I am not using this functionality right now.

So, my ideas are (just brainstorming, maybe worthless):

• Using another layer in the map editor to place these objects. The objects are not tile-based, but the placement is. This is similar to the windmill in the game. So, to place a house, the user puts a house-symbol into one tile and then in the game the house will be anchored there (but will of course be larger than one tile)
• Make the position non-tile based. The level' .dat file gets an additional table with coordinates of all the extra objects. Then we possibly cannot use the Tiled level editor. We have to test this.
• Program an own map editor. This editor could be streamlined for our needs and some processes would be much easier (the user can draw with a "wall brush" and the editor itself decides which of the nine wall tiles needs to be places in each position). Also the placement of the black lines for sliding is not really convenient with tiled. Also we could encourage the community to make levels after release. But of course, who would like to program this? It might again take a lot of time. Probably it is not worth it.

[Germanunkol]

Haha, good article :D! I smiled as well when I started drawing them, but then figured that we were still missing that one important item in the game: crates! So I went ahead.

I like the first bullet point the most. Sounds relatively straight forward, and it won't matter much in the level editor, since we can always align the images to fit to the grids, so it won't be too hard to position them in the editor.

Once we have a game out, I could imagine us making a level editor. Yes, it's not much of a fun project, but it's not all that hard, either, I believe.... and it would work with the current game as long as we have the current game's files in place and stick to the same level content. Then we could ship this level-editor later, without the game, as an add-on. All we need to do before is to make sure the game can also load custom levels... I could imagine another level-choosing screen where instead of displaying the campaign, it just displays a dot on the line for every file it finds in an extern levels subfolder.

Shouldn't be too much work... And this way we can simply decide later.

On the other hand, a level editor would require a distribution service as well... So we'd need a website with a bit more than just a download button. Though we could do it on a "Mail me your levels I'll put them up on the website" basis, which, again, wouldn't be too much work.

P.S. Love the three new red Bandana levels. They might be my favourite so far, even though they're really simple... Or maybe because of that.

[Black-Dragon131]

Hi guys.

Just wanna say I really like your work. Great idea with some eyecandy^^

How do you like this sort of style? http://black-dragon131.net/images/tiles.png

Keep up the good work! :)

[michalove]

I was experimenting with methods to make the background objects less outstanding. I tried two things: thinner lines (1px instead of 2px) and gray outlines. Here is a comparison of the two versions: What do you think? The gray-lines-version is in the most current commit. I personally like the gray-lines more.

[michalove]

I added the functionality that the player can stand on the fundament of the dragon statue (see third level) and also on the back of it. What do you think? Is that inconsistent?

[Germanunkol]

I like that the player can stand on the block underneath the dragon, but I don't think he should be able to stand on the back of it, unless a) we make it a gameplay element (some place where you need to figure out that you need to stand on the dragon in order to get somewhere higher) or b) we make it consistent by letting the player also stand on its head.

The reason I don't like it much is because one leg is often hanging in the air while you're standing on the dragon...

However, being able to stand on the box underneath is neat!

As I commented on the other issue: The background issue might be resolved by weaking the saturation. However, it might not fix it, because (especially in the first world) the background (parallax) is actually more saturated than the foreground... I like the thin lines more, but maybe we should make the lines so gray that they almost disappear...

[michalove]

I'll remove the standing on the back functionality (the feet are in the air, because the platform on the dragons back has to fit to the collision-grid in the background).

Thanks for the feedback on the background objects. I will see, if we can improve the situation by changing saturation.

[Germanunkol]

I changed the outline of the background objects to fit with the outline color of the background tiles which you drew before. Now the outlines are all gray-ish. I think this is much, much better - simply put, everything which has black outlines is a wall the player can interact with, everything which has a grey outline is background. I think it's much easier to distinguish now.

On another note: How large should the Ninja be? We could play around with scale a little more, make the background objects larger, for example, since the ninja looks like a child (large head, small body). Or we can leave it the way it is, which - in my opinion - makes it look like the background objects are a little further away, but this way the levels look emptier and we'll need to draw more objects. What do you think?

[michalove]

Yes, let us make the ninja small. Good idea to scale the objects larger.