Dev diary 8 3
dollarone
Chip ChallengeI'm working on an idea I started on for the Music Kajam. Progress is slow and I am finding it hard to concentrate on dev at the moment.
I thought that creating a kind of dev diary and adding progress updates to it here might help with motivation. Let's try it!
Today I added fade-out and also fade-ins to the game. This is done by palette shifting through the available 4 colours. I think it works quite well!
Comments (8)
Today I thought it might be cool to have a map over the world that you can peek at at your leisure. Even better, what if it was a minimap so you can see more of the world!
How to implement this? Well, turns out pico-8 has a sprite-drawing function that supports scaling and stretching! Awesome, so I can draw each 16 by 16 sprite as a 4 by 4 or 8 by 8 instead! All I need to do is to loop through the map and draw each sprite, easy!
I think I like this one:
For comparison, this is the normal view:
Nice, the 4 color fade out is suprisingly smooth!
Btw feel free to make a new blog post per update. Exchanging gamedev progress posts & feedback between the jams is something I'd love to see more, maybe it can start a trend. This also reminded me of that Github issue and gave me a couple practical ideas to make the website more friendly for that.
Nice, I had completely forgot about that comment.
I kinda prefer having a "thread" of updates - at the moment there's no way to link posts together so my progress could be spread all over the place. I'll try with a single post and see how that goes. Perhaps if I reach a significant milestone I'll start another one.
I've done some more work on the minimap - currently you can switch between three different views (small enough to fit a single screen, medium, and real size). Each view saves its position independently. I'm not sure if all these will be in the final version, as it seems a bit much. But for now, I'll keep it in.
I really like when a project has come along enough for me to test-play it. Once you can start adding new features and immediately try them out in-game, the whole dev process is increasingly satisfying. I tend to struggle with motivation until I get to this stage, but from here on it should be easier!
Here's an animation of the minimap:
I went back and forth on how to store the map. PICO-8 gives you a built-in map of 128x32 8x8 sprites, but I wanted a larger world map, and thought perhaps I'd design the map in an external app (like Tiled) and convert the output to something basic that I can use to create the map in code.
In the end I decided to utilise the PICO-8 map, and have each sprite in it refer to a collection of 4 sprites (e.g. a 16x16 sprite really). I also read the right-hand side of the map space as the south part of the map, so effectively it's a 64x64 square now. I think this will be large enough for what I want, and it also saves me from spending code space on map loading code. (PICO-8 has a restriction on code size as well as colours, sprites and map - and I'm pretty sure I'll add stuff to this game until I'm at the limit)
Not much progress since the last update. I have filled in the map with grass and started populating it. It certainly feels big enough! I think the movement feels a bit strange - I added a "helper" thing to move the player character a few pixels to avoid getting stuck, but it feels too jumpy as it is. I'll go back to basics and make sure that the movement feels good before I continue with anything else, like entering buildings.
Looks beautiful (as always), @dollarone! Keep it up - I want to play the end result :)
Thanks @toasty - full disclosure, some (most?) of these sprites are borrowed from other games, so will likely be redone.
Meanwhile, dev on this game has stopped to a halt due to life taking priority. And now js13k has just kicked off, so when I have time again I might make something for that.
But that's fine as far as I'm concerned. I will update this thread when I get back to this game - I really think it could be a fun little original game!
good luck with the gamedev!