Sengoku Devlog 8

Art progress (Diego):  

Last week I got started on, and finished, the castle interior tileset so that we no longer have just plain black backgrounds. The tiles are designed to be placed on multiple layered tilemaps inside of unity, so that later, we can apply a parallax effect which will add much more depth to the backgrounds. Here is the final look of things (still not inside of Unity though): 

I have also taken care this time to separate the unique patterns out of the rough draft tilesets in order to avoid having to do this all at once on a much bigger tileset, which can be extremely tedious (although I will have to do this for the exterior castle tiles). My reason for making sure to generate a file with only the unique patterns is that these tilesets reuse the same patterns in many areas, so to include them inside of unity is a massive waste of memory as I have seen from my past tileset tests with the machiya and exterior castle tiles. The large memory required to store these wasteful tilesets also leads to longer loading times when swapping between different tile palettes during level design, and when launching unity. I imagine this long loading time will also be translated into the load screens we will have between the level scenes, which is something we can easily avoid by trimming down these massive tilesets into only the unique patterns. Below is an image of the type of file I am talking about: 

The most challenging part was in determining how the background should look in areas that do not really have long hallway-like floors, like long vertical chasms and challenging spike areas. For inspiration on this design I turned to multiple other games I have played and really liked such as Hollow Knight (in particular the city of tears part) and Celeste (in particular, the hotel level). I went ahead and adopted an approach much closer to the look of celeste than hollow knight, using pure black for most of the background of these tough platforming levels but making sure to add window tiles that have a fade in effect along the edges. I also made some circulated fade in wood patterns where we can place torches on, so that it looks like the section is being slightly illuminated by a light source we will place in Unity. Here are the results: 

I also did some more special tiles for the stone floor, such as spikes and a crumbling stone variant, which we can use to create floors that will crumble as soon as the player steps on them, forcing the player to keep moving (and potentially dodge enemies along the way). When combined with spikes, I think this should lead to some interesting and more engaging levels. I plan on doing some variant of this for the wood floors and roof tiles as well. I also drew up some new spikes that can practically be used anywhere. They also have a bloodied up version that will be used when the player just hits one. Below are some images of all of these spikes: 

Finally, I decided to make the fixes I wanted on the doors, since I thought their animations looked a bit off in the last castle tileset test. In addition, I also did a falling water animation for the drains on the stone floor. Currently, the water is blue, but I am also going to make a red version so that we can have bloody waterfalls in areas that are seeing a lot of combat, like the castle level and city level. The water animation was by far the hardest one to do out of all these animations, and extremely tedious as well. Below are some videos of these animations in action inside of Piskel, along with the crumbling stone floor animations: 

For this week, I plan on doing those crumbling roof tiles, creating some more waterfall variants to add some more life to the tilesets themselves, and also finishing up the interior machiya tilesets. The exterior machiya tilesets are done, but I am going to go in and add some spacing in between the vertical beams for the cage like structures since these are too numerous and can become a little distracting at some points. I might also add some burned machiya variants. 

Thank you for reading this!