<![CDATA[Level Testing]]>Building Buildings
Today’s level testing began with constructing the Ryokan in Game Maker using the tiles I already have. For the first time, I connected a room with the inside and a room with the outside of the building through a “warp point” at the door. Using the “warp” function in the Grandma Engine transports the character to a another room at the same XY coordinates, so the door is at the same point in both rooms.

Lighting
Today I tried out the EasyLighting extension with my level for the first time. The system requires two colours- one ambient colour which masks the entire screen, and one light colour which is the colour generated by the light source.

The colours I used in my original text were the colours used in this tutorial, which resulted in a murky/swampy ambience!

Too murky


According to advice given in the tutorial, the ambient colour should be a darker colour and the light colour a contrasting bright colour, unless of course you want to create a light which is darker than your background for whatever reason… For this opening level of Hanami, I felt that a pink scheme would be appropriate. I started off by using hex code reference websites to look for bright shades of pink for the light colour, however weirdly when applied it came up with some weird results. My first attempt turned out these very blue lights:

Too blue


To get the right colours, all I could do was test hex codes until I found a good match.

Good light colour match


Ambient light colour too dark (and purple)


Subtle indoor lighting!

Placeholder Tiles
I made these quick tiles to act as placeholder for the rest of the level. They probably won’t make the final design, but they add a little variety to the design while it’s in its early stages! Unlike my “black-block” test level, this tileset contains sloping tiles and add gradients to the level.


Combining this with the building set makes the level design seem much clearer, especially where buildings and caves are concerned. The pink line down the middle is made of my flag tile and represents the waterfall!


This level is now completely playable as it is. For now I’m carrying on the visual design on paper by tracing the mock-up, while I’m working on creating some of the gameplay functions digitally! My first objective is to create a points system when flowers are collected. Here’s where my tracing is up to so far:

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