Battle Gem Ponies DevLog #131 (Tiles, Tiles, Tiles)

     Spent just about the whole week making placeholder tiles and arranging them in the most efficient way for both memory and ease of use. Another single day task that turns out to be a week long event.

A closer look at the tiles I've been staring at all week.

Just quickly grabbed every possible kind of tile I'd need from Google images to use as placeholders.
Once the alpha is built, I can go in and make my own tiles then see them in-game in real time.
So right now, they're sloppy/blurry/and taken from other games.
Gotta make my own before I let players see any areas with them. 

The new invisible layer of object tiles under "TEST" are markers for things like
Wall, Spawn, Surf, Coast, Waterfall, Floor Shadow, and Water Current.

   Completed:

• Placeholder Tiles (75% Complete)
• Ideas for Sequel
• Collected Art Samples for Art Style of Human Characters (based on Pokemon Adventures)
• Organized Tile Sheets by Meadow, Cave, Desert, Ocean, Tundra, Underworld, City, Indoor, Building, and Animated
• Simplified Objects Layer Tile Sheet (only prefabs that are not customizable)

     Lessons Learned:

• Save often. Had an annoying hiccup where I lost 2 hours worth of pixel art work when my computer froze.
• It seems like I'm able to get by on 4 hours of sleep if I just work all night 'til I get drowsy around 8am, nap til 1, then get up for afternoon breakfast. Hey, at this point I need every hour I can get. I've heard indies going through worse for longer.
• This Video Game Storytime series is adorable and inspiring. Wonder if someone would make a documentary of me someday. What would they write? What's the moral of my own life story?

It's taking me a while to do all this. And afterwards there's still a week's worth of stuff to do before BronyCon!

       Gotta admit. Time-wise, this is looking kinda scary. Hoping I can get a full working alpha by the end of August so I can just spend a month making sprites pretty. But so far it's looking like I'm not that fast with it. I'll keep trying to pick up the pace. Just need to get the basic shapes down. I can micromanage and make everything perfect when the game is in beta while I have it sent out to testers.

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     Oh gosh, there's like, 15 days left to do this. Crunch-Time supreme!