Over the World

This week I worked on an overworld, allowing the player to access and unlock different levels across the map. The system was pretty simple, which gave me time to work on a first draft of what the map would look like using tilemaps and animations for the player.

Click 'Read more' to, as always, read more!

Super Viola World

Making the overworld turned out to be incredibly simple. Player control is done using a rigidbody and changing its velocity.
​
To get top down control, gravity scale is turned to 0 for this object.

Velocity is a little better to use than transform.Translate, because that way the object can still collide properly.

The level nodes are similarly simple: see if the player is colliding with the trigger attached to the object, then change UI and which level to load.

Looking at it now I see a bit of sloppiness I should fix later. For one, OnTriggerExit2D isn't checking for the object's tag. Not necessary, but useful if I ever decide to do more complex stuff on the overworld.
Secondly, BeforeOpenLevel() shouldn't be looking for the player through a FindGameObject: OnTriggerEnter2D should be used to assign player, since using Find is not as efficient. I use Find a lot though, so I'll have to an optimization sprint at some point.

I did a little bit extra graphics and audio work to make up for the extra time.

The overlay was designed to look like Super Mario World's overworld screen.

I made Earthbound-esque overworld sprites with a simple two frame walk animation in all directions.

These sprites were split into different animations, and play based on the Animator floats and booleans, which are changed by the Overworld Movement script.

A simple timemap I made and imported into Unity. Tiles can be automatically sliced and imported into Unity...

...which allows me to create a larger world like this!

Finally, I made the music! It's the the same first three notes as the main theme, then using a chord progression that's pretty common in video games. I only made the start of the song, and it should lead into more, but that'll come later when I know a little more about making music.

Next I'm going to work on the RPG battle system. This is gonna be a longer process, so I'll probably create a "work in progress" next week and finish after two weeks. After the RPG battle, I have to work on an inventory system, then find out how to make the art display its pixels perfectly.