Hello everyone, welcome to Update 1 of Project Phases. It focuses on the new resolution and display system and all of the changes that go along with that. I have both a video overview and this written article that goes into a bit more detail. I am going to break this up into different sections to make it a bit more readable.
Alright, let’s go!
Main Menu Changes
The first change is tiny; the logo on the main screen is slightly different. Big deal, I know. First actually big thing, is the new resolution system. The game used to run at 1920×1080 and just display at that resolution; now the game runs at 640×360. I didn’t realize this, but it turns out running at a much lower resolution is very common for pixel art games. If I kept the old resolution, every sprite I made would have to be upscaled, which could get big both in physical and storage size. Running at a lower resolution and upscaling makes more sense since the sprites can be 32×32 and stay that way which makes things a lot more manageable. At the moment, only 16:9 aspect ratios display properly, and you can change your resolution (in windowed mode) in the setup menu within the main menu.
Overworld Changes
Next up, overworld changes. There isn’t much here either. First off, the background has been changed to one giant stripe. This is because I was testing the resolution changes, and that stripe helped me do it. I meant to change it back before the update, but I completely forgot. Next, the enemy doesn’t move around like he did in the overview simply because chasing him down started to become annoying. The game also looks bit more zoomed in due to the resolution change. I may change the camera zoom later to be a bit more zoomed out, but for now it looks good.
Battle Changes
Jumping into a battle, you can see an immediate change which the new menu. The menu is now in the center and has been completely redesigned to adjust to the new resolution. I also moved it to help lay out the battle for the future for when I have multiple-player combat in the game. The menu also got upgraded in a few different ways. The menu now holds five attacks instead of three and there are some new icons to help identify what the numbers mean in the menu. There is also a new box on the bottom that serves no purpose now, but I plan to use eventually. Also, if you end your turn without choosing any moves, you automatically wait. I also changed the way the attack phase works. If you get attacked in your attack phase you will take damage, but won’t get knocked to your next phase. I’m still messing around with the attack phase since I’m not entirely sure what works best, so I’ll keep experimenting. Finally, of course, there are a bunch of bug fixes, but a lot of new bugs too.
And that’s Update 1, it isn’t a massive update but changing the resolution did mean I had to adjust many different aspects of the game. The next update will be an updated overworld, which should be fun.
Thanks for reading,
Andy
Note: Project Phases Update 1-7 all had their posts written after their release. I did not launch the website until January 25th, 2019, so any post dated before then were created after the fact for the site and the date listed for these posts is when I released the video. I wrote these posts using the showcase videos and my notes from each update as reference and I tried to make sure I didn’t include any future information (i.e. I only wrote what I would have written at the time). However, they are also less in depth since I didn’t write notes as I do know for the purpose of the site. Just want to be clear about the timeline since it may be a bit confusing. Thanks!