Greetings, all!

Spring break! Woo-hoo!

That means that I'm using the time that I should be spending catching up on my school-work instead working on the not-so-much-of-a-prototype-anymore thing!

Firstly, I will say that every time I sit down in front of Illustrator or Photoshop, for me at least, is a humbling experience. I'm terrible at art-ing, but I can't afford an actual artist. So... that sucks. But I've been trying!

It's around this time in the little projects I've worked on where I start feeling kinda down. Because I know that nobody looking at the game will care about anything other than the visuals, and I know that I'm not really good at making good visuals. With that being said, the only way to get any sort of notice from anyone other than my roommate is to have a large amount of content already finished. So at this point it's pretty much a rush to get as much of the game finished, or at least blocked out, in as little time as humanly possible.

I've been making a tree village (the central hub of the game), for a proof-of-artwork concept, you know, making sure everything flows and works together in practice, before I rush into the rest of the game.

Things that I've gotten done in the past couple days include:
- avoided adding much-needed friction to the physics engine
- the first couple pieces of artwork
- the beginning stages of sprite sheet support (god, I hate Flash)
- better distortion culling (although you can see it mess up a lot)
- game states, like menus and start screens, etc
- parallax scrolling (can't see it in the video, took it out to work on the set design)
- a bunch of other stuff

I feel pretty productive, to say the least. Time to binge-watch all the Walking Dead episodes I've missed

Here's a little video, you know the drill. It shows off the artwork and how it interacts with the warping mechanic. Right at the 2-minute mark I start showing how abysmal the framerate drops when distorting in different scenarios.

Also please note that the leaf roofs and the tree are probably the best pieces of artwork you'll see me do. I'll try to take advantage of the blocky and jagged nature of it and try to pass it off as an art style or something

[media][/media]



Thanks for reading, like always! Pretty soon I'm going to start posting to #screenshotsaturday and being more active on #gamedev and #indiegamedev, once I get something that looks good.