20082020

Was gonna spend today building new rooms but instead I got sidetracked a bit by some visual effects, and ended up working on those for most of the day. The most time-consuming one involved implementing variable z-depth to certain structures such as bridges and platforms, which Avery can pass both beneath, and over: it doesn’t seem like a particularly challenging issue until you really try to work through it. I thought I’d have to make some pretty extensive changes to the way the depth-sorting works overall – which would have been a monumental task, essentially needing to restructure it to include a third dimension (right now it’s only sorted by the y); but I actually ended up at arriving a solution much faster than I thought, to my surprise. The final solution is actually even quite elegant I think, and is pretty easy to implement in a modular fashion, requiring only a handful of sprites and a single child object.

I also overhauled the water effects a bit, to allow water to appear more seamless beneath large ground tiles. The results are rather impressive and I’m pleased with how much easier it’ll be moving forward to work with bodies of water with more complex shores such as ponds and lakes; as well as smaller features such as puddles. Today’s the first day in over a week now that I’ve felt satisfied with my progress.