This week’s focus was on the prerequisites for creating original art for the game.
- 3/4 visual perspective support. Objects can now be drawn across two cells, where the lower cell is the front of the object and the upper cell is the top. This makes a 3/4 perspective possible. However, a traditional 3/4 perspective in which the upper cell is completely filled by the top of an object will not be used. Instead, only the bottom 25% of the upper cell will be used. This allows the front height of an object to be close to actor height while not completely obscuring the above cell. This was achieved by adding another tilemap layer and modifying the tilemap drawing logic.
- 24×24 to 32×32. After much deliberation, I decided to increase the standard sprite size from 24×24 to 32×32. I wanted a bit more detail and a more commonly used size.
- Replaced the Oryx 16-Bit Fantasy tiles. Now that the perspective has been selected, I need to mock it up and confirm that it will work. To do this quickly, I found a commercial tileset that uses the same perspective (Dire Dungeon) and replaced the existing Oryx tileset.
Todo list:
- Update the entire configuration to use the new sprite size.
- Update GUI, icon, item, actor sprites.
- Add a few enemies and objects that will enhance the variety of the early levels.
- Fix new bugs in the release build.
- Re-enable the history generator in a limited capacity.