Tiny Updates

First off, big thanks to the lot of you who applied for testing. Though I didn't get quite as many people as I hoped for, many of you are doing a great job with picking out issues. I hope everyone will continue at this speed. I'm sure many of you can see that while things look nice on the outside, things are not quite sugar and rainbows on the inside. That's alright for now, the sooner these issues are spot out, the quicker they can be repaired. So thanks again in that regard.

Okay, that's taken care of. Now for the updates.

I spent majority of the week doing minor tweaks for the editor. One of the main issues with it was that the descriptions for all the objects (among other things) were missing. I originally opted not to add them since I really wanted testing to be done, so it would take up too much time. Thinking about it in retrospect, it might be a tad harder to test if you don't know the purpose or usage of some objects. Regardless, the descriptions are in now, so things should be a bit easier to manage.

One other thing I added to the editor was a minimap. I had originally reserved space on the tile edit screen for a minimap, but I realized the reserved space would be too small on larger maps. So my alternative was to make a MM Powered Up style minimap, where each sector node is lit when you place a tile there. I ended up putting it in the upper-left, over the main window, but so far it's been far less intrusive than I thought it would be.

It may look like a mess of nothing now, but it's actually pretty helpful.

The light grey nodes represent the play area, blue nodes are checkpoints, and the purple node is the boss room. I don't have any other ideas for colored nodes, and I don't want to make it look like a messy rainbow either, so I guess this will suffice for now. Though if you have suggestions, feel free to share them.

The final thing I worked on this week was the lifebar. I had made the life maximum 32, like in the original X games. But someone requested that I increase the maximum and have layered lifebars ala Mega Man Zero. So I did just that, and increased the max health to 96, three times the original. Honestly, in a Mega Man X game, where you're constantly increasing your health, defense, and repertoire of attacks, I can't see why'd you need that much health, but regardless the option is there now and more options are better, right?
 ... right?

  

I'll have to tweak the actual colors of the bars a bit to fit with MMX palette, but the base work is done.

Thanks for checking in. As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or criticism, feel free post it below. If you're interested in this project, be sure follow and subscribe to this blog. Thanks again, take care.