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Friday, December 5, 2014

Experimenting With Dragon Souls Prologue


     I learned a lot about how 2D Toolkit's TileMaps work. I now know how to set the origin points to place character feet on the center of a tile, make it so no tile's coordinates are below zero, have objects with a lower Y value layer over things with a higher Y, and efficiently snap objects to the tile they need to be on. The objects are supposed to slide smoothly when moving and pause at the center of an adjacent tile if they stop.


     The problem I'm facing now is glitchy snap behavior. I'm noticing jittery sprites and sometimes a dramatic jump from tile-to-tile so I need to comb over the code to understand what's happening every frame. If I get this movement stuff down I can tackle calling objects on certain tiles and matching animations with grid-based effects.

   Also, I read an interesting post on Gamasutra about creating your own alien alphabet and it helped me get started with my plans for cryptic messages on game over screens. I only have the first ideas that came to mind but since reading the article I've gotten a better sense of what goes into making a cool fictional language and plan on redoing the symbols with a mix of ancient runes and Skyrim dragon text to get the aesthetic I want.

    The text is too early along to talk about just yet (still in my head) and I won't even start  again until I get the movement glitches all figured out. The text secrets are just the sprinkles on the icing on the cake. I want a playable game as soon as possible so I can see if this control scheme works. With programming setbacks and finals week finally crashing into my schedule Dragon Souls Prologue may get pushed back into January. That's fine with me as long as I can make it a fun game to play a hundred times over.

Rough draft #1 of many...

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