Progress has been pretty good on the puzzle game so far. Last weekend I concentrated on 2 aspects, size of the levels and panning and zooming.
Zooming is achieved using the mouse wheel although it needs tweaking somewhat because at the moment it is difficult to get it to come to a stop. This is probably because of the inertia involved to give the zoom a nice smooth motion.
Panning was a little harder, especially adding in the touch support (mobiles) that I’m keen to add in now rather than later. This process also needs some tweaks to avoid panning occurring when interactive sprites are clicked on. I will also need to alter both zooming and panning to ensure that any HUDs I use do not scale/move with the rest of the game, but that can wait until I actually have a HUD.
With these two control mechanisms in place (minus tweaks) the size of the level is no longer restricted to the size of the display, this will allow me to be a lot more flexible with the levels.
While I wait and see if Construct 2 is going to be on sale this Xmas I turned my attention to putting together some better graphics. For the moment I was concentrating on the walls and floor tiles. Walls are tricky blighters when it comes to full top down games, you wouldn’t normally see anything between walls; obviously I didn’t want to use just black walls as that would look even stranger, so I’ve used strips that give the illusion of walls which works well.
You can also see in the screenshot I’ve been playing around with different floor tile shades, this certainly isn’t final, I was just experimenting to see what would go best. Personally darker floors work better as it allows the projectile to stand out more.
I’ve also added in a particle smoke effect behind the projectile, and using sprite containers (and Pin) it automatically tracks the projectile without the need t run events.
