Mentlegen, the last thing left before we are ready to enter the era of art-driven level creation and gameplay development is allowing the player to transition between z layers. Tyler and I did a considerable amount of whiteboarding on the subject the other day, and we believed that we had worked it all out:
Warning: fuck-ugly programmer art incoming! ;)
I have been pretty busy over here at Studio Vorbis dual wielding the Engine and Toolkit this last week. In the interest of not destroying you guys with a 10 page article that nobody winds up reading when I'm done with all of this, I will be posting updates iteratively. As you should know, I am continuing my work with the physics sandbox. It is actually complete for the most part. Or at least as far as I am willing to take it at this point in the project. Full collision support for every layer, every important tile collider type implemented, mass aggregate physics working. The rest will come later (when everybody is off of their asses and working), so that I will not be halting all progress to implement a few very time consuming corner cases.
In the two weeks since I had released ESTkv1.5.3 internally, the Toolkit has received a shitload of usage from Tyler and the rest of the team. Within a few days, Tyler found a list of several bugs/nuances with the new release. We spent the weekend developing side-by-side, breaking the Toolkit while fixing the Toolkit. I wound up resolving all of the issues we found within the first couple of days... However, I was to be having a septoplasty within the next week. We figured with me taking a week off to recover, I could also add some trendy new features that we had both been whiteboarding in time to make the patch release. So in the interest of maintaining our momentum and taking one for the team, I had my surgery and spent the week writing code while high on painkillers. I will affectionately refer to this patch release as the ESTk "Opioid" build. Please don't try this at home, kids...
Dev brothers and fans of Elysian Shadows, it is with great pleasure that I can FINALLY announce Sheet Manager is complete! Sheet Manager is a software tool encapsulated within ESTk that allows level designers and artists to dynamically populate sprite sheets from existing graphics. This saves an enormous amount of time, as each sheet no longer has to be meticulously constructed as a grid of 32x32 pixel tiles in photoshop for each level. It also allows for more logical and convenient organization of assets. Objects and terrain can now be saved as separate images or "mini sheets" which can later be copied into each level's sheets as they're required, all within the Toolkit.
Gentlemen,
I took a minivacation from work to dev, read, achieve, and get my shit together. Marcel and I wound up having a 72-hour development marathon where we raped house and destroyed some serious code. This post has been a long time coming, and I am very happy to write this as the very first live article release for the site... The fans will be seeing this at the same time as the rest of the Elysian Shadows development team!
Marcel was perfecting the new Entity arhitecture for the Toolkit (which is paving way for the future of component implementation, especially the Animation System next). Meanwhile, I vowed to finish integrating the Dreamcast tools with our own Toolkit, to finally realize our dream of seamlessly developing on embedded platforms through the Toolkit. Since the very birth of libGyro, the goal has been to abstract all special code, considerations, and low-level implementation logic away from the high-level developers and level designers. I wanted our artists to be able to play through their levels as they create them just as easily on the Dreamcast as they can on their own PCs. I am proud to say that (for the Dreamcast), this goal has [i]finally[/i] been realized. It's now a single click of the play button...
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