• Drew a bunch more interiors
• Did a bit of a style test on a sprite

The last week has been pretty productive in terms of “work done” but honestly not a lot interesting to talk about.

Interiors

I finished the remainder of the story-important interior maps (assuming I don’t realize I missed some).

As you can probably see, these little homes are mostly built out of reusable pieces. This is because I got tired of drawing maps in the least efficient way possible! I’ve been experimenting with my scatter system to see how far I can push it and, in a pleasing turn of events, the answer seems to be “pretty far”. As an example, the smaller chairs visible in the various houses are all actually a single type of “scatter” as far as my tools are concerned, but you’re able to set the frame you want and flip the sprite, so they’re pretty convenient for bashing together a map quickly.

A Sprite

Quite some time ago I was trying out a sprite style for Geas and I drew a sprite of Kiel; just a single frame, sadly. I happened to run across it the other day and remembered how much I liked it.

Unfortunately this is made for a different resolution than I’m targeting with Black Mountain; it’s built for a 32-pixel tile (which would be about right for a 480p resolution). For Black Mountain I’m using a 24 pixel tile (because that fits a 360p resolution, which I’m using because it upscales to actual widescreen HD resolutions properly). The design is also wrong for Black Mountain; it’s an older Kiel who has gotten somewhat more confident and past her awkward teenage years.

So anyway I sat down to try to recreate a similar style, but for the smaller tile size and the right design.

I’ll probably still go back in and mess with it some, and then of course there’s the whole problem of it still only being a single still frame, but I’m glad I did it. It’s nice to remind myself occasionally that the game isn’t just going to be a sketchy red mess forever.

So What Now?

With the maps above complete, I am done the bulk of the (story-necessary) map making for the game. I’ve got two big projects left on this version of the game: Fill in the “game” bits, like puzzles and combats, and fill in the story. (After that, of course, I have the general “clean up and make sure everything’s in that I need in”.) I’m sure that I’ll need to tweak the maps as I go somewhat, but I’m hoping that won’t be too difficult. The danger with the way I’ve been building these maps, of course, is that if I need to substantially change a map’s structure I have to go back to Clip Studio and start moving things around – as I’m sure I’ve rambled about in the past, this is why I’m doing the whole “sketch” version of the game. Especially as I’ve been trying to switch to building more maps out of reusable pieces, this should hopefully not be too big a deal. So this time next week I will probably be griping about how my cutscene system has bitrot or something.

Have a good week!