This year I didn't have any preparation post because I was busy getting Tiled maps to works with my engine. This is because I want to make an Earthbound-like RPG for the Week of Awesome. So you can imagine I'm quite happy with one of the themes being "alien invasion" since that's literally what happens in Earthbound.

The other theme I've chosen is "chain reaction", which will apply to the gameplay although I won't say yet in what way. It's better to keep it a surprise.

Also for this year I wanted to use existing art rather than having to make it myself. Originally I wanted to team up with an artist but since that didn't happen I had to look elsewhere. So it's a good thing I know about opengameart where I found this pixel-art pack in a style very close to that of Earthbound. I did have to tweak the textures here and there though.
https://opengameart.org/content/isaiah658s-pixel-pack-1

The game I'm going to make will take place in the woods so I needed to place a lot of trees in the Tiled map. Unfortunately drawing multiple tress over each other proofed to rather difficult. Initially I just tried making multiple layers in Tiled with different depth values, but the problem is you have to keep creating layers if you have a lot of trees in a line from top to bottom. So that gets messy really quickly. The current solution I've come up with is to create a patch of forest in the tile sheet so that I have tilable pieces of forest that I can copy over the map. It's a lot better but very error prone, it's very easy to place a tile in a way that makes it look like part of a tree is missing. Maybe I'll find a better way though.

As for the main character, he can only walk around a simpel map right now. Also the game doesn't have any name yet so the exe is just called "main". I'll come up with the actual game name later.

Download link:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ciizr3ubrizid7d/main_v0.0.1.zip

Tomorrow I hope to get started on the most important part of the game: the turn-based battles with the aliens.