Desert Tile Set for Endless Roller

Here for my game in development, Endless Roller, I've updated it to use gameart2D.com's desert tile set.
It just adds the professional quality.

I was sick at looking at my done in 5mins crappy artwork and saw that the site http://www.gameart2d.com/freebies.html has a number of freebies to use.

To use in my game I used Inkscape and did as I explained in my blog creating scrollable background tiles. I increased the number of tiles used by 5 as I thought it looked better in the game. I added a new layer called Desert, this means I just hide my old background layer and Inkscape will only export the desert layer. If I want to go back and use the crappy versions I can unhide the desert layer and show the original background layer.

Background tiles selected ready for export.

This background is much taller than the other backgrounds. This is because I've changed the game so that the camera will follow the Rhino as he goes up in the air.

Middle background layer

Front background layer

video on Youtube of the new desert tile set in action.

Try it out on Game Jolt

Creating scrollable background tiles with Inkscape

In this blog I will go through how I easily created the background tiles for my game Shuffa ball:Endless roller. In playing about with Inkscapes layers I came up with this idea for exporting multiple backgound tiles with no need to line things up.

In unity it seems to me 100px is 1 unit in unity, so I created a rectangle 400px by 1000px, the colour is not important as the rectangles will be below what we want to export later and therefore won't be seen.

Exporting the rectangle now calling it 1.PNG, this will allow all others to have the same name which will make changing the names of the others easier later.

Next we will create duplicates of this rectangle; with the rectangle selected press CTRL+D to duplicate, do this several times. All of the rectangles are in the same place, we want them side by side so we use the Remove Overlaps in the Align and Distribute tab (Ctrl+Shift+A).

So left drag over the rectangles which will select them all then press the Remove Overlaps button.

This should expand to look like below with all aligned with no overlap.

Click on each rectangle and click export PNG, change the name from 2->8.PNG then export them. We do this now as later on we will be batch exporting the 8 tiles and it makes it easier.

The next thing we do is add the actual image we want to export so add a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+L). 

Call this layer Background, whatever we draw in this level is what we want to be exported. 

Rename Layer 1 as tiles.

After finishing the drawing on the background layer, we want to hide this level. To do that click on the little eye icon in Layers tab which will hide the background level.

This should leave all of the tiles visible on the tiles Layer, so select all of the tiles.

Then when you click again on the eye on the background level, you will see your background drawing with the tiles selected underneath.

The next stage is to batch export the selected objects. Make sure "Hide all except selected" is NOT selected. If you did that you will get the grey rectangles exported.

Click the export and we should see 1->8.PNG exported.

You can see these background tiles in action by visiting my Game Jolt page that has a playable demo,

or look at this video.

Shuffa ball: Endless Roller

After writing Shuffa ball it gave me the idea for another game. It will be an endless runner style game but with a ball, so I’m calling it Endless Roller.

It will use the same physics as Shuffa ball, but with a play area much, much wider. Endless in fact.

The process of writing this game I’ll document in this blog, most decisions regarding the game I haven’t made yet.

GamePlay

The gameplay is made up of multiple obstacles, when you touch and slide down on an area of the screen; the obstacles come down with you. Then, when you release they snap back into place, applying a force to the ball.  For the obstacles I use object pooling, a number are created at start-up but are inactive. Then when needed they are set as active off screen to the right and move into the frame as the camera follows the ball. Then when they go off screen to the left they are set as not active ready to be reused later.

Click here to see a video of this in action.

The ball tries to maintain a constant velocity, if it is going slower than X then force is added; if faster that is OK, that speed will naturally be lost through bouncing against the obstacles.

I haven’t yet decided on the purpose of the game.

What stops the game, how do you die or run out of time.

What is the goal, is it a distance or completing an action.

Hi scores are they points or time to complete.

Backgrounds

Here it will tile the various backgrounds, as we move to the right it will take the background tile A and place it next to the E.

To do this we need to have a trigger point in each tile that says if the tile goes off screen to the left move it all the way to the right, which will be off camera so we won’t see it happen.

The ball will be followed by the main camera. The tiles in the background will move at a slower speed than the foreground, this is called parallax scrolling.

We can create multiple levels of background, the furthest from the camera being the slowest, nearer the camera progressively faster.

Like Shuffa ball, Endless roller will be written in Unity, here is how the backgrounds look in the Unity editor.

Click here to see the background scrolling in action.

I have a playable demo of the game so far. It is on Game Jolt, I'll be updating this every now and again as this blog progresses.