Reworking the soil and grass textures.
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Quite happy with how the texture of the soil and grass turned out. Been working on this for the past week, iterating on various designs before I landed on this one. Gave me quite the ass-kicking, too. For a while, I was way too zoomed-in with the Wang tiles approach before finally taking the time to read TileD's manuals and realizing I could just "attach" these protrusions (or transitions) on the sides of the tile, thereby skipping dozens and dozens of tile variations.
I expect such an approach to impact performance, however. I've been thinking of storing these 'transition tiles' in a simple binary tree so search and draw during runtime isn't as bad. Of course, there's no evidence that this is slow yet, so I'll probably just store them in a flat array for now. I already have simple viewport culling, anyway. But let's see.
Before that, the grass textures looked more...spartan, I suppose you could say. I'm partial to it myself, to be honest. Not really sure which grass texture would work best as Resprout's theme and vibe slowly come into focus. I suspect the final textures will eventually settle somewhere in between saccharine and bleak, but I'm happy with the new one right now and there's no point in dwelling on it longer than I already have.
Anyway, that's about it. A little victory today and I'm quite pleased with the results. There's still a lot of work ahead. Next up are the assets for the starter crops, the various garbage / ruins you'll be cleaning up, and the decrepit shack the player will be staying in. Maybe I'll sneak in some random props (rocks, foliage, etc.) and tile variations if I have the time. I've been mostly away from the codebase the past two weeks. I miss it some, but I'm not itching to go back anytime soon, not least 'til I have actual assets to play with.
P.S. I've been more productive working on Resprout in the wee hours of the morning before I have to go to the office. Still quiet with lots of time to think, and my brain is still fresh. It's been working well for me lately. Beats feeling guilty about relaxing after work (a sure-fire way to burnout), I suppose.
Stay tuned!
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