I’ve been hard at work putting together a host of new sprite elements for Asylum over the last few weeks. As I previously mentioned I would avoid posting whilst adding nothing but sprites but I still want to check in every now and then with an update. Progress is still being made 🙂
So, over the last few weeks I’ve been refining the pipes, I’ve created sprites for the water system, electrical cabling, and fuel drums.
But this week I’m especially proud of an improvement I made to the water particles. This is important for the basement level (Shh). Particle effects are a way of doing special effects with hundreds of tiny sprites with very little impact on performance. And while they look good for Asylum there is one small issue. The game relies on the fact that it is dark, but particles are drawn over the top of everything else which means they are not affected by lights and shadows. To get around this I previous checked to see if the player was within a certain range, this works great for the first floor, but for the basement it just looked wrong. The basement is in essence pitch black so if the particles show up too early they seem to be emitting light. What I’ve done now is to add a collision check between the players torch (the light not the object) and the particle emitter. This meas that the particles start and stop as they are hit by the light – and it works extremely well. It was very pleasing to see the particles appear and disappear as I swept the torch over them and away from them.
Still quite a few new sprites to do, and I’ll post an update in a couple of weeks.
