Fairly limited but good progress this week.
I’ve mainly focussed on the separation of foreground elements from the tiles that I mentioned last week. I finished adding scenery points to each of the tiles. The way this works is that each tile type, for example a corner with exits to the north and east, has an array of CGPoints. These are viable positions on the tile for scenery placement. When a tile is placed, n points are selected at random from the array (a single point cannot be selected more than once). Then a random scenery object is selected and placed at that point.
This creates subtle but noticeable variation in the scenery. Of course its expandable too with almost no effort – new pieces of scenery and specific scenery points. On a per tileset basis too. So introducing even more variety is something I can, and will, come back to.
It seemed silly not to take advantage of the separation of these pieces of scenery into individual objects. As such, I also worked on some new animation this week. I wanted to create an effect where the scenery pops up from the tile (a sort of simple growth animation). I’m pretty pleased with the result. You can check it out in my earlier post here.
Its the sort of detail that doesn’t immediately bring anything to the game but the accumulation of this kind of thought across many elements has a significant impact on your enjoyment of the game.
Aside from this I once again attempted to tackle a dynamic background. I opted to break the background into a series of water tiles that I could then manipulate to appear as waves. This worked but unfortunately didn’t look that great. It also detracts too much from the game.
As a result I’ve reverted back to my static background. I think my solution needs to be simple. Something to suggest movement without taking over the scene.
That’s it for this week. In the coming week my focus will be on some more tidy-up and embellishment. I may also begin to tackle the level select screen.
As promised, here are a few WIP screenshots from the game.
