The fun thing about having three kids is the waves of various unknown diseases you collect. That, plus my day job ramping up, meant that a weekly dev diary was not really feasible. Moving forward, I think fortnightly updates are the way to go.
Anyway, the first main thing is that the new train UI is done, and the rest of the framework for progression is in place. Buildings now have their own progression levels; for example, the bakery is no longer available at the start, but in level 2.
The second main thing is train coloring. This may not sound like much, but there was a bit of work required to separate the sprites out to support this. Every train car is now separated into separate sprites (where relevant) for:
- Parts of the train that should not have their color changed: roofs, windows, outlines, etc.
- Parts that should be colored in with the main color.
- Parts that should be colored in with the “trim” color.
- The wheels, which are now animated for all cars and not just the steam engine.
- The load – mainly relevant for log cars, originally it was just a sprite sheet of 8 load states with the whole car copied.
- Front details – in the case of the log car, the stakes in the front need to be renewed on top of the load, but the load has to be rendered on top of the car, so a separate sprite is needed.
Finally, you can now click and drag to move the camera. That may not sound like much (it wasn’t), but that means the game actually fully works on Android now! There is one more platform I’m looking to put this on, the Steam Deck (just got one a couple days ago!), but it’ll be a bit before I tackle that.
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