• Neglected to post a devlog for a month
  • Completed an interior area
  • Reworked some level flows

Happy 2022, everyone!

The last month has been kind of hectic, and I was sick for some of it (no, not with that). I’ve managed to make some progress but haven’t gotten around to writing about it.

The Second Floor

The second floor of Black Mountain (which I mentioned a few months ago) is an abandoned town carved out of the rock. When pilgrims journeyed to visit the phoenix that lives atop the mountain, they would stay here. Unfortunately, like the rest of the interior, it has fallen into ruin and is now empty.

Or is it!? (It wouldn’t be a very interesting area if it was empty so you can probably guess that it is not.)

Some Miscellaneous Code Fixing

Since I am, fundamentally, much more of a programmer than an artist, I sometimes try to sort of side-step into getting some work done by tackling a small code issue or whatever. I’ve done that a few times, so my Entity Palette works a lot better now. I was having a lot of trouble getting Godot to actually generate preview thumbnails for the placeable scenes, so I read a lot about Viewports and the like and I’m now simply instantiating a little copy of the scene into the toolbar. It then also does some scanning of the scene to figure out how to automatically scale things so they fit into the “button” properly.

Getting the math right on the scaling was surprisingly challenging! Not because it was especially difficult, but my brain had temporarily stopped working, as it does.

Scatter Was Worth It!

Adding the “scatter” objects that I talked about in my last post was completely worth it. Much of the “dressing” of the rooms in the screenshot are, in fact, scatter, and while the bits themselves need some work, the workflow with them has been great, and it’s freeing me from having to hand-draw a ton of rocks, which I’ve gotten pretty sick of drawing.

Unfortunately, there’s not a ton more to talk about despite the long period between posts. Working on these maps is time-consuming, but I don’t want to show everything off. I’ll have to work even harder to figure this out when I get to actually filling things in with story. That sounds like a problem for later-Kildorf, though!

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back in a week. Have a good one!