Star Child Dev Log #16
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:
First, there was Purple Alien. This is the environment we have shown in most of our screenshots and videos to this point. Our task was to fully create ONE of several environments in the game, and besides a bit of art still to do, everything is functional and not a huge step away from release-quality.
The Purple Alien environment includes a purple tileset for walls and floors, several types of plants, mushrooms, and rocks, native enemies, and a few environmental hazards/mechanics. The Purple Alien environment also has its own background, and music track.
This week my task was to create the next environment, which I have dubbed Fire Mountain. A simple palette swap works for the base tiles, since this is also a rocky-type environment. Hue-shifting my starry sky background to a nice yellow seems to work well.
As for the local flora, a palette-swap of the Purple Alien plants does not seem appropriate for this hot place. So, I created plants that hopefully appear to fit into this area.
Some good news is that I don't have to rewrite code when it comes to having these plants animate whenever they are brushed against in the game. I could have one single plant object that changes to a different type based on environment, but since this is a different plant, which will be used in a different place, I choose to make it a separate object.
For environmental mechanics, so far we have pillars that rise when you shoot the appropriate switch, and blocks that crack and then break and fall away when you step on them. I showed these in the previous devlog. I will also add lava tiles, you have to have lava in a Fire Mountain after all.
And enemies. I have ideas, I have sketches, and it's time to get back to work. Come back next week to see what fiery bitey things will be chasing you all over FIRE MOUNTAIN!
Janne - the other guy:
Lately I've been doing a lot of things outside the game itself, e.g. setting up our official community Discord server with clear rules, roles, channels and all that, as well as preparing all the things needed for playtesting to start. Requested our playtesting keys from Steam and set up tracking for which ones we've used already, wrote guides for how to get the testing done and what kind of feedback we're looking for, and coordinated with Jay to ensure that we have a nice amount of content for people to test. It's still early stages though so the content is just a small fraction of what there will be.
You can now join our community Discord at https://discord.gg/yQRADXHvXY
I also got to experience the joy of previous good habits paying dividends when I fixed a bug with some character state not being saved correctly being fixed essentially with 3 lines of code in the same file with the state. The really nice thing here was that it was really easy to find the relevant code after not having touched it for months. Another potential complaint was that we might not be fully resetting character state when starting a new game, and a likely solution took only 2 lines.
First, there was Purple Alien. This is the environment we have shown in most of our screenshots and videos to this point. Our task was to fully create ONE of several environments in the game, and besides a bit of art still to do, everything is functional and not a huge step away from release-quality.
The Purple Alien environment includes a purple tileset for walls and floors, several types of plants, mushrooms, and rocks, native enemies, and a few environmental hazards/mechanics. The Purple Alien environment also has its own background, and music track.
This week my task was to create the next environment, which I have dubbed Fire Mountain. A simple palette swap works for the base tiles, since this is also a rocky-type environment. Hue-shifting my starry sky background to a nice yellow seems to work well.
As for the local flora, a palette-swap of the Purple Alien plants does not seem appropriate for this hot place. So, I created plants that hopefully appear to fit into this area.
Some good news is that I don't have to rewrite code when it comes to having these plants animate whenever they are brushed against in the game. I could have one single plant object that changes to a different type based on environment, but since this is a different plant, which will be used in a different place, I choose to make it a separate object.
For environmental mechanics, so far we have pillars that rise when you shoot the appropriate switch, and blocks that crack and then break and fall away when you step on them. I showed these in the previous devlog. I will also add lava tiles, you have to have lava in a Fire Mountain after all.
And enemies. I have ideas, I have sketches, and it's time to get back to work. Come back next week to see what fiery bitey things will be chasing you all over FIRE MOUNTAIN!
Janne - the other guy:
Lately I've been doing a lot of things outside the game itself, e.g. setting up our official community Discord server with clear rules, roles, channels and all that, as well as preparing all the things needed for playtesting to start. Requested our playtesting keys from Steam and set up tracking for which ones we've used already, wrote guides for how to get the testing done and what kind of feedback we're looking for, and coordinated with Jay to ensure that we have a nice amount of content for people to test. It's still early stages though so the content is just a small fraction of what there will be.
You can now join our community Discord at https://discord.gg/yQRADXHvXY
I also got to experience the joy of previous good habits paying dividends when I fixed a bug with some character state not being saved correctly being fixed essentially with 3 lines of code in the same file with the state. The really nice thing here was that it was really easy to find the relevant code after not having touched it for months. Another potential complaint was that we might not be fully resetting character state when starting a new game, and a likely solution took only 2 lines.