The Shining Source

Meanwhile I'm giving the whole shopping and item system an overhaul .

Made some major fixes to the shop and item system now, it should work a lot better! There are still a few smaller things to fix there though .

Btw. Ty, one other monster that would be really cool to have would be a Medusa. As BABS supports facing changes in combat, I think it would be totally brilliant to have a battle where the characters turn to stone if they accidentally end up facing a Medusa .

I'll give her a go What I might end up doing is drawing it 24x24, then scaling it up for cleaning. It seems like the smaller resolution is quicker for me to work in (and looks less sucky )

I realized that another thing we could try is drawing them full size (say 1000x1000 or so) from the right angle with thick lines and then downsizing them to 48x48? Perhaps that makes it much easier to get the proportions right? We support PNG alpha channels so as long as the big versions lack in detail the resize may well lead to a decent result?

Hey Ty,

I think I found a good and quick way to do these things. Here's how:

1. grab the 100x200 template PNG from the sprite directory and load it in GIMP.
2. Resize it to 1000x2000, using pixel resize (to keep the template line easy to select and delete).
3. Draw your sprites. Use a brush of size ~13 with hard edges, and don't bother about shading (at least I didn't) or excessive detail. Use Shift button to draw short straight lines if you have a shaky hand like me .
3.a. Also, use the Layer transform to mirror your sprite for a cheap walking animation in the case of otherwise symmetric sprites .
4. Save it in a good format at this size so you can reopen and edit it later.
5. Remove the gray template lines. Selecting them and pressing delete may be a quick way to do it.
6. Scale the image down to 100x200 using anything but Pixel Resize.
7. Use a Sharpen filter of strength ~50.
8. Export your image to a png file and there you go!

I just tried it out myself, and could make the following in about 20 minutes (first try).

Let me know if it works for you!

Small correction there... a brush size of 10 works even better actually .

Just wanted to say that this project still isn't dead . I've revised some of the map transition engines, so that it is possible to skip to a different map if a certain battle has already been completed previously .

Very small message here. Made a tiny update allowing people to save their plot progress, using the F4(save) and F8 (load) keys. The character stats have yet to be added to this primitive save state engine, but I just felt like putting at least *something* in this time .

Awesome dude, glad to see things are still moving along

It is, albeit at a sluggish pace .

I added a few more small things today, after having done so about a month ago. Main change now is the ability to enter maps at custom locations, instead of the default startx, starty locations.

nice
yeah the old workaround for that was ok (making multiple text files for the same map to give it different start positions) when you had 2 entrances, but once it got beyond that it was quite tiresome, so a great addition

More updates as of late. I added a tiny and oddly tactical battle in the Downstairs bar, and I've implemented a mechanism for treasure chests, and item rewards.

I also added a few more shallow NPCs. I'm still short of artwork as usual, but I'll just make do with what I have for now .

There's now a way to bucketfill tiles on the map..by holding down the shift button while placing tiles .

For the first time ever BABS now has full QuickSave/QuickLoad support. It saves/loads everything that is remotely relevant in the game.

I'm still thinking what kind of saving/loading interface is the most elegant, but currently I save with F4 and load with F8...still very simplistic.