Tile Maps

Allow me to start off this segment with a little vent, I think I deserve it. It’s been, what, four months since the start of the project?

Shuli has not contributed a single thing.

This is my mismanagement to bear, I suppose. After one or two months of inactivity, I should have kicked them out and started looking for alternatives. But I stubbornly believed that maybe, just maybe, they cared about this project at least a little bit. But I was proven wrong, it seems.

My ultimatum for Shuli fell on deaf ears, despite all the promises to do better. They can alwayss type out a storm when apologizing, but just never anything else. I still regret having given them the benefit of the doubt.

So, it’s the end of January. There’s no tiles in the game yet. UGH!!!

My first and second attempts were total failures. Too dark! Doesn’t match the vibes of the moon at all, the circles are messy and don’t read as craters. Into the recycling it goes. Or, I guess, this blog post.

Then I came up with this atrocity. Genuinely don’t know what I was thinking. It looks like sludge. The worst thing is I really did spend a lot of time on each one, too, because I tried to make everything connect in seamless ways.

Here’s my first victory: the grass. It’s separated into three different layers: the part you walk on, the part that overlaps with the player, and the farther part for perspective. It still isn’t a perfect system, but at least it looked presentable. I think.

Here’s how the grass looked with one of the older tile sets. It felt revolutionary that some bits of it could cover Stellio’s shoes.

The battle with the rock ground continues. I kind of had a vague idea forming now, what with the craters and whatnot, but put together it just looked disgusting and weird.

Here I tried to use a plain grey base with the craters on a separate layer, but turns out I couldn’t figure out any clipping mask layer options on Godot, and also this looks awful.

This was the final version I came up with in the end– It leaves a lot to be desired for sure, but at this point I’ve spent probably over a month working on this with not much progress. I really need to move on and take care of other things.

It looks somewhat passable now, no longer nightmare inducing at the very least. Still flat looking, but I couldn’t care much about that at this point.

This looks kind of okay now, right? Right?

Moving on. I have so much to do.