Hey everybody. We’re excited to announce the 3.1 iPhone Game Kit’s availability for immediate download. We have refreshed all your download files, so simply use your existing download links to grab the contents of the new Kit. What follows in this blog post is a little description of what has been enhanced.
The enhancements to the Kit are primarily geared to help y’all start getting creative with the community project. We’ve updated the art download as well as the code download. The PDF books haven’t changed.
First, the art download now contains all the art files we will need as a team to create Quexlor: Lands of Fate. In addition, all the character’s we will use now have transparent backgrounds. This makes creating spritesheets much more efficient. Sometimes twice the sprites can fit into one sheet! This will save a lot of memory on our iDevices and help our game run that much smoother & quicker.
The file naming has been improved for many of Reiner’s art files. For example, each of the character art files now includes the name of the character to prevent loading collisions. Also, many of the German words have been translated into English to make it easier for a wider group of people to make spritesheets. Finally, all of the PNG files have been saved in a more optimal 8-bit format, causing the entire art download size to be reduced, even though there are more characters included!
The codebase is mostly the same, except that many stubs have been created for the objects and enemies that will populate the Lands of Fate. We will be releasing the 3.2 version of the Kit before the first official day of the community project, January 1st. This 3.2 version will include many of the core features of our community RPG, including touch-based movement, magical throwing axes, the stomp wave, and strafing. It will also include the updated items.png so it is very straightforward for us to code the new items and objects.
Another improvement to the codebase download is in the ground-lof.png tileset. We’ve drawn some big versions of grass, dirt, sand, snow, stone, marshes, water, and lava based on some of Reiner’s tiles. We then took some of Reiner’s masks and applied them to the big tiles and created halfway-transparent “connector” tiles. These connector tiles make it easy for you to put, for example, a water tile on one layer of your tilemap and an “edge” dirt tile above it. Basically, the new tilesets speak for themselves. Load them up into Tiled and you will see what I mean! They are waaaaaay easier to draw with and include the 8 main types of “ground” which will make up the Lands of Fate.
So, enjoy the enhancements included in the 3.1 Kit! They will make it much easier for you to start designing levels, creating spritesheets, and pseudo-coding your enemy’s AI in the community project.
