Metroidvania Jam 15.01

Diving in with somewhat of a methodical approach, I decided to start working on the main world foundations first. I want to be able to go through the game’s rooms as soon as I can. A lot of the more complicated stuff was already handled by VRIF’s prefabs and systems, like the grappling hook, grabbables and such leaving me to work on the exciting things like enemies and world creation.

I originally started with the idea of using magica voxel to build out the world and then paint on the sprite textures with sprytile. Sadly just building out the room with magica voxel and exporting optimizes the mesh by creating triangles in the most optimal way so when I tried to paint the sprite textures they tried to paint in the triangles and simply clicking tris to quads doesn’t really work.

But now that I think about it maybe coloring the voxel model like in a checkerboard pattern in magicavoxel so that when exporting the uv hopefully exports with a more convenient Mesh for painting on within Blender. For now I’m building props and the base meshes of the rooms with sprytile. The reason I want this to work is because the meshes from magika voxel are so clean while in comparison, sprytile sometimes get you these seam lines from within the vr environment. And it’s kind of a bummer seeing them.

I looked into the seam problem but the fix for it was to turn off anti aliasing for the camera in unity but I’ve read over and over that turning off antialiasing in vr is a terrible experience for the user and doing so just isn’t recommended. So here I am dealing with the seam lines for now until I test my latest theory with magika voxel.

I could probably mask them a bit better by changing the skybox that’s set in the scene to a darker one but man that’s just such a bummer. Perhaps crocotile doesn’t have this issue but I’m not ready to spend that money when I’m not that married to the style.

Im having the hardest time thinking of a couple of puzzles to place in the world to gate the player a couple of times and vary it up a bit for the game loop.

But speaking of puzzle-making, I’m just so lost and clueless on making them. I looked up a couple of videos and while they do give me a lot of great definitions and ways to think about puzzles. I just ain’t got time for all that theory I need the spark notes of puzzle design 101.

For now I’ll take the approach of starting from the end of the puzzle and work backwards and just sprinkle in some exposition and flavor.

That’s it for now, I’ll probably build the world an hour or three at a time while tackling doors next time. I won’t be able to work on the game as much tonight as I have a performance to catch. Until next time!