With the extension of the sparse nodes yesterday to allow a much larger working space, I set out to try recreating one of the more extensive levels today. For the most part, it worked nicely, but it did expose some things I needed to fix.

Fortunately, they were small.

First, I remembered (when it happened) that an item selected from the editor palette was being dropped near 0, 0 in the level – no matter where you were looking at the time. That obviously is not desirable, and I was able to fix it fairly quickly.

Another issue is that the Soojin node wasn’t serializing its “locked” property. Again, it didn’t take long to fix.

Both of those were nice in that the system more or less worked, and where it didn’t, I had all I need at my fingertips to make it work. It’s really satisfying when you have built a system enough that it eventually starts to make your life easier. You put in the work, and it pays off at some point.

There was another issue, but it’s not something affecting the level design at the moment. I did try it out, and it failed at first and then did something weird. The case was where you save a level when you’re not at camera position 0, 0. It does serialize the values, but there is no code positioning the camera on load. Then when I went to move, it whipped me off to where it should have been. That should be an easy enough fix, but I haven’t done it yet. A new card for the Trello board perhaps.

The new level shows up a glaring problem, though: I have no idea what I want these things to look like. And some of the nodes are really dark, even when on a bright background:

On a darker background (where the sidewalk ends), it’s even worse:

So I need to work out what these will look like, as that will determine what the nodes will look like. Or I’ll need to good layouts that work with the existing nodes, possibly with colors tweaked.

Still, exciting to be able to bring the level together and see it work. Progress is being made. If only I had more of an artistic vision for this.

(For contrast – and for fun – here’s what the 2D version looked like:

Perhaps even something simple like that could work.)

Day 23 – Friday before a Saturday!