This week, I completed some ground work required for polishing up the graphics for the game. Some flaws in the rendering engine have been addressed to ensure that the graphics will display at the highest fidelity possible.

One long standing issue was that the sprites for characters and tiles would be distorted if the window was resized to an aspect ratio that differed from the virtual aspect ratio. I made some enhancements to sps-gamelib that allow users to choose which rendering method to use. From within the options menu, a player can re-enable the old behavior of stretching and distorting the graphics. However, the new default is to draw a frame around the game area if the window’s aspect ratio does not match its virtual counterpart.

I also made some minor tweaks to entities, which enables them to be drawn as facing left or right. Characters appear more lively now, and give the placebo effect of reacting more fluidly to input.

The largest chunk of work on the table right now is polishing up the graphics for the game. Right now the graphics are all placeholders that I upscaled from rushed 32x32 tiles, used during an earlier version. Fashioning the new sprites is very time consuming, but it is nice to see the past two months of effort sketching has paid off.

Want to chat? Throw a comment on this Reddit post or shoot me a tweet @XBigTK13X.