SlimeGame Devlog 3: Tile Cacophony and Code

Also, moving Back to More Code Things

What you’re about to see below is a problem. It is the slime-block tiles I’ve put in to replace the old ones. On some level they feel better, more tile-like and less viscerally disgusting (it remains to be seen if that is actually better). Presented afterwards is not so much a problem as the hopeful start of a solution.

The problem is that I don’t actually have my new slime block tiles sufficiently detailed and set to deal with all their varying confligurations, so stuff gets weird. I don’t really want to go to a full Nth-case level of autotiling, so ideally I want to do something that can be handled at a 47-tile level.

And here’s how they look now. Better, but still not ideal, I guess. It feels too muted, not quite outlined and cartoony enough to fit the rest of the game so far.

So one thing I might do generally is darken up the tiles, but I’m also looking at maybe doing “2x2” bitmask tiling with a smaller pixel size per tile. I think that might be the way to go for overall simplicity and function.

I know she’s a slime, I think the princess blends a bit much into the slime block, and in addition ot the outline thing, its texture feels out of place. I think my next plan of attack will be a “2x2” tileset that works in a lower resolution than the main tileset and retains the more outline-heavy style of the rest of the tileset, although I do want to preserve some of the transparency if I can.

I’m also moving back into actually coding things eventually. This game will naturally need enemies and adversaries but it’ll also need menus and textboxes. For menus I’m going to go relatively straightforward, similar to the pause menus in Rest Stop 23, Missing Cats, and The Watchful Deep. From The Watchful Deep especially, I have a lot of experience making menu states and lists of possible menu types. (Please ignore any glitches or debug items in the menu below; the point is, I made a somewhat professional/functional menu before and I can do it again!)

Since this is a lower-resolution project—similar in that respect to Rest Stop than to the others—I’m probably going to go out on a limb and also program a bit of a menu-scroll like Rest Stop 23 had.

For dialog boxes I think I want to go somewhat comic-booky, and then just connect them either with drawn art or by selecting from a “spritesheet” of connectors in-game. Here’s a really bad example of how it might look.

Actually that’s not so bad. It might even be decent, with some refinements to box/text.

That’s about all I have for today. If you want to follow this game’s progress, you can always:

Edit: I misspelled “cacophony” to my shame.