Summary:
In which the title-screen art is updated; level one sees some tweaks; game-saving is threaded; and a cutscene is begun.
Greetings and salutations!
For this week's screenshot, one more look at the title menu, with further revisions to its art:
The week just past was fairly productive, I feel! It saw some work on visual art, level-tweaks, a technical improvement, and more!
To start with, as shown above, I made further tweaks to the art shown on the title menu.
Some of these changes were things that I'd forgotten in the previous version, like distance-haze and the inclusion of a signature. (The latter being something that I'm still not accustomed to. ^^; ) Others were changes that I felt improved the piece, such as fixing the perspective on the orange-stoned section, or reworking the scale of certain structures. And still others came from critique given to me on Twitter, such adding as elements on the right-hand side to prevent the eye from being drawn past that border.
And overall, I'm much happier with it now, I do believe! ^_^
I also made some tweaks to level one. Two of these were minor: I moved some pages that had been, I think, made less visible by changes in the game's lighting, and I made the distant mountains look a little better, I feel.
Perhaps most significantly, however, I removed the "portals" that allow visibility between the "mummification" room and the upper barrow-corridor. The door that connects them isn't openable, so I see no good reason to incur the expense of portals there--especially as the "mummification" room contains another portal looking into a third room.
And indeed, removing these portals does seem to have improved performance in that section. I may even have removed a nasty hitch in frame-rate that could be experienced when exiting a certain room into that upper corridor!
On the technical side, I finally attended to a task that I fear that I had been somewhat putting off: handling the process of saving the game in a separate thread.
In short, what this does is allow the computer to work on saving the relevant files without stopping gameplay to do so. The result is that saving no longer has a significant effect on the feel of the game (on my machine, at least). ^_^
There were a few tricky bits to this, such as how to handle the "quicksave" button being pressed multiple times, or what to do about multiple types of save being triggered in quick succession. Nevertheless, for the most part it actually went surprisingly smoothly, I feel! (... Presuming that no terrible bugs are lurking unawares, of course...)
And finally, returning to the art side of things, I've started work on the introductory cutscene for level two. Thus far, I believe that I have its text written, the first scene completed, and a start made on painting the backdrop for the final scene.
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^