01082019

I can’t believe it’s already August. I stepped outside just now to look at the sunset only to realise (too late) that the mosquitoes have come out in full force. Thankfully though at least both the heat and the humidity have subsided significantly. 

Speaking of which, I missed yesterday’s post because it was just too hot and humid and top of that I didn’t even get any work done because I was too preoccupied with adjusting the positioning of my fan. I mostly just worked on some item descriptions – the firestarter kit, ironically – although I didn’t make too much progress overall.

Today was a much more productive day though and I got a respectable amount of actual content done, as well as planning for the next several days.  I completely redesigned the layout and structure of the areas, which started with significantly reducing the size of the rooms, from 2048×2048 (grass: 50k) to 480×480 (grass: 5k). Before, the idea was to have a bunch of larger rooms chained together, but now I think it’s a far better idea (both design-wise and technically, since the pixel jittering on horizontal camera movement is too much of a pain in the ass to work through) for the game to feature a bunch of smaller rooms, some containing locations of interest, chained together instead. Each room has a designated “level” (right now, there are five of such levels) that dictates the chance of them appearing upon a room transition. 

I’m not gonna talk too much about the specifics of how this functions right now because a) I’d like it to be somewhat of a surprise and b) I haven’t figured out the exact details of its structure yet but I do believe that it’ll significantly improve the gameplay overall. In a broad sense, I believe that it allows for much more variety at a more respectable pace (instead of forcing the player to wander around a massive area) and creates a greater sense of disorientation for the player, which is in this case a good thing.