Putting sprite to grid

 I've started laying sprites. Nice! I wrote in the last post that I was looking for a way to start building the actual maps for the game. I did it! And from there I've been building up the main game map. While doing that I've also been making new sprites to fill niches that are missing I notice as I lay out my map. 

This feels like a milestone. After months of laying down the foundations, all the programming and artwork, I can finally walk around my game's world. What a feeling! 

A short clip showing how the game plays at the moment

I was looking into using a tool or external program (even rolling my own) to build and load the map after having a hard time using Unity's in-built tile editor. I solved the main problem I was having with unity though, so I have been using that so far. The problem I was having was that every time I updated any or my spritesheets all the existing sprites on the map would break. It was doing this because Unity is smart with the way it splits spritesheets up into individual sprites: it will ignore empty spaces by default. If later on I went and added a sprite in one of the blank spaces the ids of all the rest of the sprites would change as well. The solution was simple: I discovered that this was what was happening - the hard part - and then I 
found the setting to tell Unity to allow empty spaces in spritesheets. Voilà!

The gates of the Union...

I quickly found I needed a lot more sprites than I currently had. I really needed more small terrain details and things to break up the plain grass that made up a lot of the open areas. So, I spent a bit of time working on those. I also started up again on my industrial sprites, because I needed a lot more of them to even start laying out the industrial areas. 

A bin chicken at home on a pile of landfill

After mucking around in-game and walking around for a bit, I think I will need to pull the camera up a little. It's hard to get a sense of any scale when you can't see more than a metre in front of you. I kept the camera close in originally to keep the view focused and restrictive, but now I think I need to relax it a bit.

Astroturf lawns

I also had some thoughts about the gameplay, again. I've not yet reached a point where I'm as confident with the gameplay as I want to be. I've reached compromises that satisfied me before along the way, but nothing has yet felt finalised. A game generally consists of puzzles for a player to solve, giving them a mental or reflex challenge that feels good to solve. So far my game has none of that. While of course I don't have to go all in and add pointless puzzle minigames to my game I do feel that I have to make some effort to speak the language of a video game in my project. I believe with some minor tweaks to my story I can add in some basic survival and problem-solving challenges, while also streamlining the introductory story and setting of the game. I don't want to talk too much about these changes here just now though, I'll let you know next blog post whether they're going ahead.

For now though, I'm going to continue laying out the main map and adding required sprites as I go.