There have been a number of changes to the game since my last update. Perhaps the most immediately useful is that it now has a working name – “Beneath.” So now you can call it that instead of “Galagonwagon’s game project thing.”

Check out a demonstration of the new stuff (click below, and use the arrow keys):

On to business.

I realized that in the last post I forgot to credit the source of the awesome lofi graphics that I’m using for Beneath. They are from oryx of TIGForums, who did an outstanding job creating a huge number of graphics for the independent game development community. Check out the rest of his work here.

There have been two big changes to the game itself, one obvious and the other not. The obvious change is that there are now all sorts of interesting objects on the map. Note the stairs, piles of gold (I need to draw some bags), and our hero’s humble base of operations. The door doesn’t work yet, so you can just walk through it, but you’ll notice that some objects are impassible and others are not.

The less obvious change is that I now have a super-useful tool for helping me create these environments for the game: Ogmo Editor. Below is a screenshot of what it looks like (click for detail).

I’ve got things set up so that most of oryx’s graphics are available from within Ogmo, with which I can “paint” the environments by clicking around inside the middle area. Once done, these can be saved out to disk and then loaded into Beneath. So not a huge change for the player, but this will make my life much easier once I begin to construct the various environments of the game.

In the preceding paragraph,I mentioned “painting” the environments. Let me explain a little about what that actually means. You’ll notice from the screenshot that there are lots of small images in the palette on the left. Now, imagine that you have an electronic piece of graph paper. What we’re essentially doing is placing those little images onto the graph paper, one image per square in the grid.

Next, there are layers. Imagine instead of a single piece of graph paper, you have three transparent pieces which you can place one atop another. The very bottom one contains floor and wall images, the next one contains objects like the gold piles and table, and the next contains our hero (and eventually enemies). Then when it comes time to actually draw the images onto the screen, you start by drawing the images in bottom layer and work you way to the top. That way, things that are “higher up” actually appear on top of the lower graphics. This technique is pretty old, it is how many classic console games like Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog were made. If you’re interesting in learning more about it, google for “tile based game.”