LOTLW Devblog is back! I decided to start writing entries again because I came up with an idea to write it like a diary - a bit every day. I've also decided to not post entries in certain less active sites, so I can use as many images as I want and not worry about getting them to work everywhere. So, here it goes:

August 8

Doors are now animated. It's a simple one frame animation: If a distance to the nearest character is below 16 pixels, the door changes to the "Open" frame. In total there are 3 frames for every door: "Close", "Open", and "Open while a player is in a building":
While the player is in a building, the dark part of the sprite is no longer necessary to conceal the inside of the building and looks weird, so I made a 3rd frame to fix it:

Animated doors are the first of many new assets that I want to add before beginning work on Eastern Trilith area.

August 10

Started work by trying to find a way for the game's music to stop desyncing. A lot of anxious staring at this:
Apparently, that's something I can't fix with GameMaker Studio 2 engine that I'm using. Though the desync is only 10th-100th of a second, so maybe it's not noticeable. After a few failed attempts to fix the desyncing issue, I started making new town assets.
Signs, benches, and other "street furniture".
The new Locul:
Making world assets for LOTLW is extremely enjoyable for me, so I'm ending the workday very satisfied.

August 11

Started the workday with making more assets for Locul. Animated the "clothe lines", added potted plants, wardrobes, etc.
But enough messing around, it's time to start making something truly new. Here begins the development of the Eastern Trilith area! I've started with tile sprites and choose a ground color for steppe biome.
Steppe gravel brown. Ain't it beautiful? =] There will be 4 main biomes in LOTLW: - Desert: Moonrise Desert, Two Suns Desert, Berelem, Salt Road. - Steppe: The Fallen Kingdom, Triliths, Kingdom's End Battlefield. - Meadow: Eir Meadows, Crossroads, Kingdom's End, Atan's Enclave, Luma, Eir. - Field: Rannah's Domain, Lockfall, Silver Fields, New Grawas, Old Grawas, Korrev.
Every area will have bits from different biomes, plus unique assets. Then there are cities, with their own architecture and assets, so areas should be very varied and pleasant to explore. Anyway, after choosing the ground color and making steppe stone road tiles, I've begun planning the layout of the area.
I already knew what I wanted Eastern Trilith to be like, all I needed to do is to transfer that knowledge correctly to the level editor. So I made an 8960x8960 image and added it to the GameMaker's room editor's asset layer. This is a trick I'll be using a lot to help me create areas - I'll make various assets to highlight custom zones, add custom grids, etc. Custom grids are especially useful for placing objects correctly. (To create a custom grid, create an image of, for example, a square with only borders and use background layer to tile the image)
To clarify, three things are called "Eastern Trilith": - The town of Eastern Trilith. - The in-game area, called after the town's name. - The trilith itself. More about triliths can be found in entries #10 and #14. The "Eastern Trilith" game area has 3 regions in it: The town - blue. The no man's land - yellow. The bastion - magenta.

The area is shaped by a siege that was happening during the final years of the War. Both triliths could have granted the Kingdom victory if rebel city forces did not keep the triliths under the constant pressure. The vastness of the conflict will be seen in no man's land: A devastated zone full of traps, craters, and other remnants of the War. The road to Eastern Trilith will lead through it. The bastion was abandoned after the War and has been infested by demons. The bastion will be a challenging maze-like structure containing challenging fights and treasure for experienced players. After marking the zones, I decided to add the talkstone trilith that gives the area its name and with that, end the workday.

August 12

I decided to do something that was bugging me since the last demo version was released: Enemies the players face at the start of the game are just too tough. There were multiple solutions to fixing that problem: - Making the players stronger/making the enemies weaker by changing their stats. - Making an "Easy mode" that changes enemy/player stats. - Allowing the player to choose one of several "Starter gifts": One of them would strengthen the player significantly. - Creating a tier of very weak weapons and giving them to the enemies. I went with the last one, which is probably hardest to implement, but the most immersive. So I've spent several hours making "Timeworn" weapons: - Blunt iron sword. - Dented iron claymore. - Blunt iron axe. - Loose iron hammer. - Deformed iron mace. - Glyphless staff. - Deformed iron beacon. - Bent iron bow. - Loose iron arc.
These timeworn weapons deal very little damage making the first few fights not as scary for the new players.
Appearance-wise, they are slightly modified iron weapons:
Rogue wielding a loose iron arc. It's pretty hard to differentiate timeworn weapons from normal iron ones, but I'm not going to fix this problem now because I want to get back to building the new area. The current goal for the new area is to make the clay brick architecture tileset.
Fancy non-flat wooden roofs, 9 out of 10 Locul residents are jealous! Now that basic buildings are made, I need to add more details to them, make windows, floors, etc., then I'll chop them up into tiles, put them in a tileset image, load the image into the project, and I can start building the town! But that's for the other day.

August 14

Here's the detailed house! Most of August 14th was spent trying to turn the detailed house into a tileset. The difficult part was making the roof tiles. Here are the process screenshots:
Creating wide plank tiles.
Creating roof edge tiles.
Creating thin plank tiles.
Creating tiles for the transition between thin and wide plank tiles.
Almost there...
And done! After making the roof tiles, I quickly made the rest of the house tiles. Especially happy with windows:
After the tilesets were ready, I began to actually build the houses! Here's a sketch I'll be using to build the town:
MS Paintastic! (Side note: While the sketch was made with MS Paint, I use Aseprite to make LOTLW graphics) I still need to think more about what the town should have, so the sketch will become busier. Anyway, the tileset turned out to be flawed and lacking like a dozen tiles, so I'll continue working on that tomorrow. I did manage to build this house before the end of the workday:
So, that is all for this entry. Do tell me if you like this new format =] Until next time!