Visual Updates!

Hello again everyone! This week there are lots of visual things to talk about and some more behind the scenes work too!

I've been busy refactoring some more of the code as I talked about in the last post. I've started using scriptable objects to make the code more structured and easier to develop. Previously, I've generated tile grids for the pathfinding system each time you load the game. Now I've got it setup so that the array of tiles is saved to a scriptable object along with other important data for the pathfinding. While it may take me some time to properly integrate scriptable objects, they should do wonders for the speed of development in the long run.

Onto the visual updates now! As you can see in the above GIFs, the Flop Shark creature now has sprites. They are not final and have been placed simply onto the segments of the shark. Nevertheless, it looks much better than the placeholder circles I've been using! The sprites are bigger than the passages the shark goes through because we intend to have it 'grind' against the environment. The areas you encounter the shark will be heavily torn, scratched and generally ruined places because of this.

That brings me onto the next thing, tiles. We have been working on a better main tile set which the majority of the world can be built from. You can see an early version of this new tile set in the above GIF. When experimenting with how we could make a tile based world more interesting, I discovered an issue. The Unity 2D rule tiles I had been using did not allow 2 separate rule tiles to join together. I had to use the new custom rule tile script template they provide to accomplish this. Here is a code snippet along with the tile setup I'm using in unity. 

Not sure how many of you will find that useful but you never know! Below I will put an example of what this allows: The two smaller squares are made from 2 broken variants of the new tile set. The square above is made with all three tile sets on the same tile map. This is incredibly useful for us to get seamless tile sets working together in an easy way.

Well that's pretty much it for this week's update! I hope you like the new visuals and I hope the tile set explanation is helpful to some of you. Leave a comment and share this if you are enjoying the posts! :D

(Also, if these GIFs seem a little fast paced, I think they might be. I'm having a play with the settings of my recording software and I'll see if I can get better results for the next post)