Game art progress

Level 1, but now with updated art. It’s still not really final – the large trees could use some work, the jungle borders are still somewhat flat and the water is too obviously tiling – but it’s definitely moving in the right direction. It took me quite some work to make sure the enemies were sticking out enough from the background. I’m using more saturated and bright colors for them, while I try to keep the background darker and less saturated. It surely takes some testing to get right.

So, that’s what I’m working on now, and the more I do it, the more I get the hang of it. Pixeling is fun and with my in-game editor in a usable state, creating these levels is actually quite enjoyable. Let’s hope it shows in the final product!

Enemies approaching!

It’s time for another progress update about Aural Fighter. Though college is taking quite some time these days, I’m trying to spend as much time as possible on this game. This week, I’ve started work on an in-game level editor and I’ve drawn some enemy fighters and made a Python script that allows me to easily create new enemy types by simply editing a text file. This data is converted into HaXe code, so while it’s easy to modify some values, it’s also compiled as code, which means it doesn’t need to be parsed at run-time.

I’m thinking about doing different sets of enemies, each with a distinct style. This screenshot shows some of the first set I’ve been working on. It’s all still early work, but comments are welcome.

Improving your toolset

The problems

After I had thrown away Flash CS3 and started to work with HaXe, I found myself in a somewhat spartan situation. Manually linking art resources by handcrafting a xml document isn’t exactly the most fascinating or fool-proof part of game-development. Notepad++, the text editor I’m using, offers syntax highlighting for a wide variety of languages and has tabbed browsing and can display function lists, but that’s where it ends, too. I don’t have auto-completion, compile buttons and visual settings interfaces, and so on.

Also, I’m spending a lot of time on school these days, so where possible, I want portable solutions. I want to be able to plug my USB stick into just about any computer and start developing right away.

The solutions

So far, I’ve found a few helpfull tools. One of these is LetMeType. Basically, it monitors what you type, and offers suggestions based on what you’ve typed before. It’s pretty customizable and provides a nice auto-suggestion ‘feature’.