Deck16

Vox Venio development blog entry.

I’ve been supplied jumping animation frames from the project’s artist Candice. Our hero character is starting to look, well, like a proper platformer hero! He doesn’t jump like someone’s put an ironing board down the back of his shirt anymore. I don’t think it worth a YouTube video just to show off a single new animation, but I’m sure it’ll get captured in the next video I make.

After doing that I implemented what you can see in the image. Layered tiles. The pictured tile types are, from the left: block, fore, back and lastly fore and back together.

Up until now Vox Venio would only allow one type of tile to occupy one spot. Now it allows the various types to co-inhabit. Doesn’t seem like much, does it? My poor programmer art is not showing off the potential of this very well.

It is important though. Consider a cave using back tiles for the cave wall. Until now, the level designer was unable to add fore tiles — not unless he wanted a big square hole in the back wall of his cave. There’s less obvious potential too — a plain block tile (say, a brick wall) can be festooned with a fore tile (perhaps some creeping ivy).

For all I bang on about it though it took me only about three minutes to make the code adjustments. I consider that fair after hours and hours spent on parallax scrolling backgrounds.