Some new art resources this week, plus lots of building on Shoda’s Brook. Also, I’ve added a second map and some events that almost amount to some story!

Download the most recent build.

Follow the road north, and head out of the map in that direction. You’ll go to Shoda Brook’s graveyard, where a couple of important people (to Kiel, anyway) are buried.

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Discussion

I built myself tiles for a river, which will come in handy. Unfortunately, I’m not super pleased with them. I like them, in general, but they’re a little lackluster without animation. I am fairly certain that I can make a convincing brook with just “spot animation” – a couple of animated tiles use judiciously rather than animating the whole thing – but I haven’t figured out what those animations should look like or how sparsely they should be laid out, as you can see.

I brought my gotomap() function up to speed, and added a bunch of new thingies. As it stands, you can call the function as gotomap(“newmap.map”,x,y) to do a quick, instant map switch. You can also, however, provide it with more information: if you call gotomap(“newmap.map”,x,y,“quickfade”), for instance, you’ll get a quick fade out and fade in for the map switch. You can also supply a second effect, say gotomap(“newmap.map”,x,y,“slowfade”,“quickfade”) to have a different effect in than out.

The current supported effects are: fade, quickfade, slowfade, mosaic, and crossfade. These are actually all implemented (with a few quick helpers in the map switching as needed) inside the gui library, so if I ever need to (for example) fade out I can just directly say gui.effect(“fade”). To fade in, I pass a true to the function as the second, “reverse” parameter, like gui.effect(“fade”,true).

All in all, a productive week, despite the fact that my keyboard has started to bite (it will randomly ignore-or-not-ignore some keys, including things like Ctrl), and the fact that I’ve gotten a cold and my nose has decided that the best way to deal with such an illness is to spout blood at the slightest provocation (such as a light breeze three rooms over).