[WIP] Mine to the sky

[Codestar]

Yeah, that should probably not happen...

[Codestar]

UPDATE:

A few days ago I began work on a sprite animation and packaging tool. Later on, this will allow people to mod the game and add in their own sprites/animations/sound effects. After I've finished this, I'm going to try to start on making some new pixel art for the game. :-*

[Silversea]

Yeah, that should probably not happen...

Collision issues usually happen if the sprite mask is not symmetrical to the center/origin of the sprite, but it could just be how you've done the collision coding too. Most of the time it is the former, since the coding is done for one side and when you turn around the sprite gets stuck.

[Codestar]

Yeah, that should probably not happen...

Collision issues usually happen if the sprite mask is not symmetrical to the center/origin of the sprite, but it could just be how you've done the collision coding too. Most of the time it is the former, since the coding is done for one side and when you turn around the sprite gets stuck.

Yeah, it was actually just an issue of allowing the player to destroy blocks while they were hanging. Fixed now.

Anyways, I've started revamping the sprite style in Mine to the sky, going to increase the size of the tiles as well as the character.
Here's my first iteration of redoing the character sprites. Larger sprites will allow me to give more detail and make the character better reflect the concept art. This will also make the upgrades/new helmets more readable.

[Codestar]

UPDATE
I'm currently working on background tiles now. I'm not entirely sure of the approach I want to take with tiling the dirt blocks.

I'm currently torn on whether I should stick with the current tiling that I have, where each tile is a distinguishable dirt block and is wrapped with borders or go with my new approach which is wrapping the blocks and keeping the inner tiles dark. I've gotten comments from other pixel artists that the previous approach seems t0o noisy.

old tiling example


new tiling example

[Kelvin]

The new way looks better when dealing with large chunks, but I like how the outer blocks are lit better. Dunno if I'd do it with the background tiles, though, since you're supposed to be able to see them. Maybe come up with a smoother texture? I do think the darkness helps with making digging more interesting; you can't see the resources until they're on the edge, so it feels a bit more Minecrafty.

[Gwen]

I think there could be a compromise between both. Your current option can be a bit much but the proposed solution is too much as well.

[Codestar]

Thanks for the suggestions, I believe I've come to a solution after looking at how Nintendo did the tiling for the caves in Yoshi's island. In my game I'll have the former "blackness" tiles be randomized combinations of various rock patterns. This will also allow me to show minerals and crystals in a more natural way as well.

YI example


New tileset

[Codestar]

I've kind of kicked into full on drawing mode so I'll probably be posting a lot of updates on the conversion of the current assets and such. Last night I whipped up this new idle animation as a test. The sprites before didn't even have an idle stance, they just had a static sprite for idle.

[Codestar]

UPDATE


I've started working on a couple of background assets. Making pretty good progress overall. Really dreading the day that I'll need to replace that large Yoshi's island cave background. It's going to be quite the challenge.

As for code, I'm currently working on refactoring some of the core ImpactJS code to work with a new (and hopefully faster) inheritance library. I've got to squeeze out as much performance from the engine as I can because there is going to be a lot of entities on screen at any given time and I want this game to run FAST.

[Codestar]

UPDATE

So at this point I am extremely on the fence about continuing to develop Mine to the sky in ImpactJS.

Impact's entire code structure is not very v8 optimization friendly and porting everything in impact to a cleaner Entity component system based approach seems like more of a hassle than just starting fresh in Phaser and using it's nice ECS based structure for doing things. Luckily, I don't think it will be too painful concidering that a lot of the core game logic is done, but it's still a huge loss in productivity.

What's sparked this is that I've noticed over the course of my development that the game is getting slower and slower, and this is a result of the same things that plagued the Cross Code developers. Too many properties on objects to get optimized properly and huge inheritance chains.

I really want this game to run fast in a browser because it is ultimately going to be a relatively fast paced game. Here's hoping that phaser helps me reach that goal. Not to mention I'll finally get to use webGL and shaders in my game (which was going to be a huge headache to impliment in Impact).

[Codestar]

I animated a thing.

[Kelvin]

So far, this game looks beautiful! So can't wait to play it!

[Koh]

I animated a thing.

Looks nice and smooth~  I think the back limbs could do with being darker though; it's hard to tell which is in the back.

[LunchPolice]

Just discovered this thread now, and this game is looking sweet. I would buy this