…have been the order of the day. I’ve been adding a few more particle effects to Beacon and fixing bugs, and I was starting to get annoyed at how platforms you could easily reach beneath you often fell offscreen thanks to the widescreen aspect ratio. So I fixed it. Now, when you stand on a thin platform or on the edge of a cliff, the camera moves down subtly so you can see what you’ll drop down to.

What the new camera does is, it scans the map and shifts up a few tiles when there’s a lot of empty space around and underneath you.  increpare showed me some neat camera tricks at CB2 which kinda fed into this: one effect of the terrain-aware camera is that, when you jump, it detects space underneath you all of a sudden so doesn’t follow you up as much. That’s a side effect, but it’s pretty useful by itself.

I think the game’s almost there graphically now. I’ve still got a bunch of stuff to do but I think I’ll manage to put it out this week. I think you’ll like it!

So what’s that lovely chap randomnine working on? Why, he’s been polishing his second-place LD48 game Beacon!

HERE’S A PICTURE

Back in January I put together a spiffy editor for all of Beacon’s game data. Over the past week or so, in between INCREDIBLE MISHAPS WITH VEHICLES, I’ve been updating the game world to make it that little bit sexier. I’ve also been adding graphical shine because it makes me happy. Up there you’ll see the particle effect for the astronaut’s jetpack and the new baked-in lighting on the tilemap.

There’s a certain irony in adopting crappy retro graphics for the sake of expedience and then spending hours on graphical effects to make them look better, but whatever! I’m going to have a kickass engine for random platformers after this. I will license it for millions. ♥