TOE week 49: Excuse My French

Blarg. You know it is a good blog when you have not updated in two weeks and it starts with a swear word.  Unfortunately I realized that I have been doing this wrong.  I wanted to make customizable bits that I can use to create a level basically out of legos. Now this works but many blogs ago I basically said that you should white box your level first and then art it. I kind of ignored this and did the reverse. The problem is that I am ignoring the design and constraining it to the artwork. This is a bad idea. It is supposed to be the other way around. This is harming me in three ways; 1 making a fun level, 2 the amount of space I have to control in the background is ever increasing, and 3 it is killing my productivity the very thing it was supposed to greatly help. 

I have also decided that I am going to start making a level. Mainly because I think I have enough objects to put something together that is small maybe but still interesting. I have decided to make a level the way we did it on the Batman game I made. Whitebox it when the design is good, art it. You know the freaking industry standard. Sometimes there are reasons for the way we do things. Though I am also not going to throw away my title sets going to use them to create the art after design is finished. 

In other more productive news. I made a parallax background element this week that had some problems. I asked my Facebook friends what they thought about it. Mainly so I could suss out what wasn’t working with it I settled on this. 

The size of it made me reduce the size of the Factory and the Ziggurat. The tower is supposed to be large and imposing so the other two needed a slight adjustment. Wound up looking like this. Might still need to be smaller. 

Two weeks ago I burned myself out a bit so last week I did some easy tasks. My game can now spawn a sub weapon pickup on the destruction of a lamp. Sub weapons now use the game’s default gravity and collide with the collision objects instead of just floating. I can specify what subweapon spawns on the lamp’s destruction. This is not terribly well implemented but it WORKS. More maybe later.

Also now when the player dies they disappear then are teleported to the last checkpoint they hit. So I have a working check point system in the game now. Somewhat rudimentary but it works!

I was also drawing a fair amount over the last two weeks. I have finally filled up my sketch book! I have been meaning to make some concept art for the tower in the past and future. So I have been sketching some of the new designs into the future tower concept.