Developer Logs

In V0.2, I had started off by building the Menu UI, How i achieved this by starting off with a tiled background of solid black and add some particle sprite instances around the background like stars. I added the title of the game onto a new layer using a text sprite and added another text sprite that tells us to press space to start, which I later programmed to have a fade effect on repeat for emphasis and made it functional for when the space bar is pressed down which hides the start prompt and makes another layer that i have added visible, this layer include all the options such as starting a new game, loading from save state, and options menu. only the start and load from save state is currently functional, they also go darker and have a sound effect when the mouse is hovered over it again for empathise. I have also using logic pro made a soundtrack for the menu. I created a layout that is supposed to give a bit of backstory before the game begins when you start a new save and created another layout for before the menu starts with a like terminal effect and some notices before you enter the menu. For the first level that I had implemented, I had used piskel to created the sprites used (including my first iteration of my character sprite that doesn't have much movement animation) and to make the tile map with a grid of 32 x 32 that had to be later upscaled either x3 or X4 for the 1920 x 1080 resolution of most displays so everything didn't look tiny when displayed.

The Sprites I created:

• My character (Animated On Condition)

• Trees (Animated)

• Bins (Partly Animated)

• Door (Animated On Condition)

At this time my character cannot do anything but move around, there is currently no puzzle going on in the game as I was more focused on the Level Design in this build. I have also added a basic dialogue at the start of the level and a pause system that becomes visible when esc is pressed it stops and hides all sprites at this time, you have the option to either resume the game state, start again from checkpoint (last save state), options (again not yet functional), and back to the main menu. 

Just as I was about to finish this version, I found out that plugins were a thing with the engine so i did have a browse and i found a CRT effect plugin, shine plugin, and a frosted glass plugin and so i have implemented both the frosted glass into the background of the pause menu and the CRT globally since it makes pixel games simply look so much nicer it just that its artificial. The shine plugin is yet to be used and i do plan to use it in a future build that allows certain sprites to shine.