Posted December 14, 2021 by Geek_Joystick
Hello everyone !
During the voting phase of the jam this game took part in, I saw multiple people playing said game, and I noticed quite a few where wondering why the screen transitions were the way they are.
There are multiple reasons as to why it is this way :
The first is that, being my first gameboy game, I have no idea on how to make continuous scrolling between two rooms, and still make the whole thing clean and aligned in the end.
The second, which came after, was that this way it was possible to load entire tilesets and palettes during the transitions (and as such, it could allow for very diverse areas, though it wasn't used that much in the demo, mainly due to time constraints).
On the other hand this made fading out the room you're leaving obligatory, due to the fact that graphics and palettes could change drastically between the two rooms, and the room you're leaving would be very, very ugly during the transition, as a result. I still made it so that the new room scrolled in the direction you where going, so as to keep the world a bit more "together", rather than it feeling like a simple collection of rooms.
Scrolling in the rooms was also a bit of a problem, though not as much as trying to transition continuously between two rooms. You see, the gameboy tilemap is bigger than the screen, but not big enough to fit two screens in width nor in height.
This is why when you move from room to room, it fades out, before scrolling in the new room.
If you have other questions on how the game works, feel free to post a comment with your question, and I'll try to explain as best as I can!
Thank you for reading, and see you next time!
Geek_Joystick