Devlog 3 - Tileset + Player Variety

Hello everyone and welcome to another devlog!

Today we have... not much to show outside of visuals. There are a lot of things in the works that aren't quite up to the point I can show them, mainly gameplay oriented, but lets get into it.

The main focus of my recent progress is *drum roll* A TILESET... yeah, I wasn't pleased with the current visuals of the game so I took the time to create an entire new tile set to use for the arena in each test in the game. I went with something that wouldn't clash with the stark white background so I picked a theme for the tiles  that would both stand out (I was aiming for something much darker for maximum clarity) and fit with the lab environment. This is when I began to iterate on a steel plate design that coated the outside with a steely grey colour and a lighter, concrete looking inside which kept the whole 'constructed for lab test purposes' feel of the whole thing. This is the final design I landed upon:

I'm fairly happy with the final result and don't think I'll make many changes to it any time soon as it does its job of marking out clearly what is a surface the player will collide with, separating the foreground from the background. This will become especially important if I get around to adding more detail to the background for that reason. The best part of it all is that it didn't take me too long to set up after the initial few tiles! The tile set below is what I'm using to create all the (collidable)  environments in my game and I do this in a way that is definitely not the most performant way to go about this but quite efficient. I use this tile set by layering multiple grids on top of each other and adding increasing detail with each layer instead of creating tiles for every single type of possible case. If I went any further with this project it would definitely be something to be redone for performant reasons but for the time being, this will do fine.

That's all for the environment this week but for the future, I would like to add faint tiling on the background, to make it look more like the walls of a laboratory, with a parallax effect to create a sense of scene depth.

The other small addition is that I finally got the player shader I've been working on fully working! With this, I can create players that look entirely different (except for the standard lab rat outfit). The shader takes colours for the hair, skin tone and shoes which are randomly selected from a set list of colours for each (to prevent goofy looking colour combinations from happening) giving the player the sense that they're playing as a new expendable lab rat test subject each run of the game (as each time a run ends, they explode) and bonus, its all done without me having to create multiple sprite sheets for different looks which would most likely have been the case (I don't know how bad this shader is performance-wise or if multiple variations of sprites would be better but performance isn't something I'm worried about at this point).

Now I've spent way too much time on the visuals of the game :P so next week its gameplay time! I wish to have at least 1 or 2 playable 'game modes' on a few different maps that randomly rotate between each other done by the time I write the next one. A lot of the ground work has been laid out for this but actually implementing it in a way it doesn't become code spaghetti is a different issue, especially the way I write code.

Another aspect of the game that I haven't even dared dipped my toe into is the dialogue system I wish to have where Kyle the overseer and the scientists will converse with you  to give you instructions for each task (or not in Kyle's case) which will simply be a giant text bubble that appears above the player with icons to represent who is exactly talking. This most likely will turn out to be bare bones of what I would implement if I had the time (adding procedural typing of the message as many games do, with some highlighted/coloured text for important information) which could turn out to be easier to do than I thought but we'll have to see where that goes.

See you in the next one!