Pirate Arrrt

As I wrote last week, doing graphics and art(ish) stuff is slow going for me. But there is a bit of progress to show you on Key, Shovel, Treasure. Which, come to think of it, is an upside of graphical stuff: you've got something that's easy to show afterwards :).
First off, I added the parchment backgrounds to the UI elements in the game. Getting them right took quite a bit of tweaking, but I'm happy with the result. Here are a few examples from before and after.

Next, I experimented with the look of the sea tiles. Uniform blue tiles do a good job for clarity, but it is nice if the sea looks a little more watery :). So I created five water tile images with different swirly patterns (yay for Paint.net plugins and cloud rendering). When the map is generated, each tile is assigned an image at random and is turned a random amount. The result is rather subtle, but does the job of breaking the monotony.

A while back, Michiel suggested (for another project) to slightly vary the colouring for the tiles using Perlin noise. This could add a bit of variation on a larger scale. I may give that a try as well. And here I am, still wondering how it is that one always gets lost in the jungle that is gamedev ;).

The last thing I'd like to show you today is a work in progress. I'm re-drawing the boats for the game, so they'll look more like actual pirate ships. In the gallery below, you can see where I started and where I'm at now.

The skull and cutlasses will be added to the sails in team play. I'm uncertain whether I should keep the skull white or whether I should make it black as well. I think black looks better, but white probably makes for a (even) better visual distinction between the teams. Oh, and of course there will also be a skull on the main sail. Other than that, I still need to add the steering wheel and perhaps some more decorations such as a band along the ship in the player's colour.

And that's it for now. Slowly but certainly we're getting closer to a finished game :D.

​- Willem -