Unicorn Training: Tile Maps Done

     All the maps are tiled out now. All that's left is to do some touch ups on the forest scenes and add some colliders. I want to connect every room in proper order using my door system so that the world is finally real and tangible. I'll worry about enemy and object placement once those are coded. I also wrote down which enemies will appear where in the GDD for reference later. There's 17 enemies in the works right now and if I keep up a decent pace I may have the whole game done a month early!

     I really want my first RPG to see the light of day and that day is sooo very close.

Missing Tiles (Lesson Learned)

     I'm still making maps today and I'm noticing a few slip ups on my tile sheet design. It's all fine and really just minor detail stuff, but I really should have made a few extra pieces that accommodate singe spaces and those rare corner pieces that can link perpendicular angles together. I also had some redundancy issues in that 2D Toolkit allows for flipping and turning sprites which made doing that for some tiles on the sheet pointless. The 3x4 arrangements shown above really aren't enough and I'll more likely need 12 tiles per terrain instead of 9.

    For now I'll just work around these limits but in the future I'll need to be sure I have tiles filling in 1x1,4x4, and corner positions. I'll also need to separate each sheet my tileset so I can easily reach all the tiles I could need for a particular area. I should also keep in mind how I could save time by having all the commonly used tiles in different variants(snow version, desert version, grass version) placed in the same position. That way I can swap out the Tile Sheet component and the map editor will automatically switch mapped tiles to match the ones on the replacement sheet.

Gushing About: SPORE

     This game... Is a lot of things. From what I hear most often it was mostly a disappointment. Spore was hyped up for years and it became my first PC game. That was when I found out it didn't quite live up to the spectacular industry changer I thought it would be. It released in 2008 (geez that feels like an eon ago) at a time where I wasn't allowed to  play video games on school nights (parents, right?). I was allowed to play this because I convinced my parents that it was educational and tied into evolution and space exploration which were two things I was studying in science class.

     Because of all the hype and my video game starvation I was able to make the most out of this game. It wasn't perfect but I didn't care because like all the people who remember having an NES and a library of 6 games, it was all I had. My old computer was slow and clunky even on the lowest settings, but the game still looked beautiful because it wasn't a sheet of paper or news program. I liken this feeling to how hungry I get at a cross-country meet. After you run the fastest 5K in your life you dive for any kind of nourishment you can get. I used to hate gingersnaps until I finished a race and end up wolfing down an entire box of those rock-hard cookies on the way home. When you're starving for a game it tastes that much better and that's what Spore is to me.

     With Spore being my only weekday video game I was able to make the most out of what it did have to offer. A fun creature creator, an amusing cell stage hunting game, and a gigantic galactic conquest system. Even now I can play Spore for those reasons and still have a blast for a short while. Skip over the features I didn't like and dive right into the good stuff. Spore actually has a nostalgic value for me now because of this history I have with it. I wonder if anyone else has a game they forced themselves to love forever?

Using New Tile Map Skills

     Shortly after starting to place dungeon tiles the old fashioned way I realized that it would take forever. Why not use tile mapping to save the background image as a prefab then place non-tile objects over that? It'll even save total memory in the final executable. So now I'm using the tilemap strategy I learned last week to make all the levels. It should be done by tomorrow. Then placing everything (besides enemies) should take another day.

    I thought using this tile map editor would be amazing and dear lord is it a dream. What once took hours can be done in minutes. Tons of boredom and hand cramps resolved with a simple drag & drop interface. 2D Toolkit is beautiful and it continues to make my job way easier.