Syrup Dispensers From Hell is coming along quite well. I’ve decided to use the Legend of Sadness base for the game, which plays and looks a lot like a Legend of Zelda title. Instead of having our hero travel into a cave, he’ll be travelling into a breakfast restaurant to save us all from horrid syrup dispensers.
This time around I’ve got a lot more experience working with Akihabara so I’ve been able to work harder on gameplay and graphics rather than learning how the game engine works. Designing tilemaps for a game, as a programmer, is tough work. It’s not that I dislike working on art or even that I’m not artistic, but what looks great in The Gimp looks like shit when it’s tiled a hundred times.
Doing graphics for a game is basically incrementalism combined with healthy doses of iteration. You tweak a pixel, test it in-game, hate it, go back, tweak another pixel, hate it, go back, and so on.
A neat feature that I discovered today was Akihabara’s ability to scale the size of the game display by a value that is less than 1, meaning that it does not need to zoom to an integer value. Currently I’ve got the game displaying at 320×240 with a zoom of 2.5, making that actual output 800×600.
Well, back to work :)
