Continuing with the testing, I’ve added texture to the map… made it bigger and fixed some small bugs.

If you played the original game, at the beginning we had everything constrained to a single screen. After some updates I added a slight scroll when I made the game adaptable to every screen. In this game, I definitely will have bigger maps… exploration will be important, as I’ve refined my optimization techniques I feel comfortable using a huge amount of objects without fearing of performance problems.

Packing.

I’m using Texture Packer, and I’m extracting the animations from SWFs. There are 2 reasons to do not export assets directly from Flash (as I did in the original Tapping Dead).

1) Extrude. Extrude is really important when you are doing tile maps, if you are scrolling content you may have gaps between your tiles. Enabling extrude in Texture Packer fixes this.

2) Allow Rotation. Starling 1.5 recognizes rotated textures. This saves you a lot of space in your spritesheets.

Lighting.

In this game I’ll use particles (as in the original) but also will add some lighting effects. To do so, I will use blending additive filters (as in this test).

So far, this is how it looks.

I’m using textures from the original game for testing purposes, but I plan to rework the art. Actually I’m tempted to change the theme… but it is too soon to make a decision, I’ll let that rest for a bit.