Hello once again, we're back at it with further expanding the Moof project. This time around is more than the levels and Moof movement, more the location he's moving around, the map.
World maps in games make a sense of level selection from branching paths, going back to older levels if wanted to for maybe a good power-up only some levels have, and making a coherent path of the world to see how far a character really travels, in this case the Moofs are going to have things start off at their island, before going into a land with different landscapes, biomes, and designs.
What I started with doing was making a test map, before putting it in pixel form I made a placeholder using a site called "Inkarnate", which essentially will let you brush together maps of your own shape and density of tree or mountains. It has a free version so.. I used that to make a test run of the Isle of Moof.
Complete with beta level markers, but no giant tree in the middle.
Using this as a test base, I also made one asset for maps like these, pathways, how the character is charted to walk down between levels on the world map, so far it's only a test run so it's not the smoothest, but I feel like it works.
The map itself looks like two rings, but they're able to be used in a tileset form to make curves and turns to wrap around certain bigger details if needed to. For ease of viewing on the map, I may likely make the path thinner, less a road carved through it and more a trailed dot line akin to a cartography map.
Alongside the World Map, the realization came in I also may need a front and back Moof Sprite set to use with this feature, to make him truly walk down any direction on the map. And the short way to explain it, and show a bit more, is to show how big the Moof spritesheet is so far, this is how much he has.
An idle, needing to get some more sprites for a lively idle animation, a surprise or slide post running sprite,
7 for walking, a jump and fall, 2 versions of 2 dive sprites... or could be swimming if wanted to also, 3 for run pre smoothing out,
one squish sprite, and a set of new Front and Back sprites, standing, and walking.
Lots of Moof, and only seemingly growing, I'm curious to see just how many exist when everything is done and finished, but the answer there only will come when it happens, anything can happen between then and now.
It's almost funny to think about it now too, but comparing those sprites to a few years ago, with a style not as refined and when mostly just screwing around with Construct 2 on Steam, that those sprites and these were by the same person with a few years gap...
Weird to look back to.
And he's so much smaller too when side by side, which.. kinda makes since since this was before Moofs were a thing, so it's using a dragon who shares the Moof yellow bands and tan stomach..
Or I guess actually more sense saying Moof shares his. As the original Moof design was 2019, and meant to be like a comically small version of the dragon lad on the right, before the Moofs became a separate thing from him.
But it's neat to think about so much detail you can put into a little lad if you know how to right. Comparing 2022 to 2017, a 5 year difference.
The last thing to address is the slime enemies, before they blended in with the darker backgrounds, and one suggestion was adding a lighter outline, so I tried that, and now I got this result:
This I feel like can work in light or dark environments, although I need to see if the goo creature like this is too small for the game or not, that will require further testing. But visually the outline greatly seems to have worked out.
Although, that was the last update I've got for this week, I will keep trying to get even further into this project and have more to show for updates for the next, bettering it more and more until I get it done.
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