This week of PnP2, I continued to work on the tile map, and the overall level design of the starting zone using a program called Tiled. This allowed me to import custom and pre-fab sprites into a sprite sheet, then set dimensions of the map and begin designing it. I went through 3 separate iterations of the map. The first was small scale and I was able to get a feel of the programs basics. However, I ended up expanding the map, because it's small scale would leave little room for the player to be gradually introduced to the basics. So I expanded the width and height by a ratio of 1.5.

This 2nd iteration I built out the map with a full player path in mind, and started thinking about where enemies and possible world items would be placed/pace. Once I finished this iteration, I got some feedback from Amara and other teammates, They explained that the path in mind would be hard to follow without some kind of guide. I went back and made further improvements based off of the feedback I was given. Then started looking into the logic of how to actually implement the map and it's multiple layers.

This is where I hit a wall. I already had several layers and built the map, completely forgetting about translating the data and working in collision aspects. At this point I discovered that I could add custom properties to each tile on my sprite sheet( such as a bool for walkable ). However, the custom property would only be honored on future placements, not on the already existing placement of the tiles. I started to plan to recreate the map 1 -1 with this custom property added to give us some sort of data to work off of via exporting the new map as a .json file.

This is when I got with Velma, who was handling collision logic to see if this was something they could work with. After some back and forth, they discovered that there could be another way to translate everything over without recreating the map. I plan to get with them later this afternoon to talk it out and get a game plan going.

Hopefully by then start of this next week, I will have Zone 1 implemented working with Velma on collision logic. This way I can start on the Overworld UI/ begin making the codex for all the potential creatures. I plan to start small with this endeavor, adding a small backpack button in either the top left or right of the screen, that will pause the game loop, open a drop down menu, where I can add an entry for Items, FaeDex, and work with the other teams on what other menu items we would need at that point.

I would've worked on this to begin with, but to try to keep the work to a minimum, and prevent having to go back over and redesign an overworld menu, I wanted to see what the game looked like using the zone 1 as it's back drop. So I could design the UI around the style of the world.