It seems it’s time for another dev log for Reel Dream. Things have been consistent with development and a monthly dev log seems to be working.

Last time I mentioned how I had decided to use the Tiled Plugin for MV, and that meant preparing all the tilesets for use in Tiled. Expanding the auto-tiles for use in Tiled was what took the longest.

March was meant to be setting up tilesets for use in TileD and with how my time had been going, I thought this entire month was going to be setting up the tilesets and water animations.

Lo and behold, the water tile animations were much easier to get through as I only had to set them once, then I could just change the image and save each individual water. Animate once, change image, save as new tileset file. Done.

So with that being so easy my main focus was organizing the non-water tiles. First I used the AutoTile Converter plugin that comes with the TileD Plugin to do what I could.

This Sprite Sheet Slicer made it really easy to splice the tilesets to prepare for the AutoTile Converter.

Then after converting I just took the exported files and combined them into standard MV sized Tile sheets.

There were wall tiles that didn’t follow the autotile of say, roads and such, that I actually took the time to edit the AutoTile Converter for. It was a bit frustrating as I got the numbers for the pattern wrong a couple times, and I think some of the brick tiles just didn’t seem to follow the pattern of the others? Not sure but eventually I had to say it was good enough. I think it still saved me the time it would have taken to do them manually.

Either way, after the tiles that needed a converter were done and organized, I looked through the ones that didn’t need converted or needed more minor edits: houses, cliffs, trees, etc. I organized and edited them to work better or at least be better organized and took out the duplicates that were in the original tilesets because of how inside/outside tilesets would share tiles.

So now I’m done with setting up tilesheets and am into practicing with TileD and making sure basic mechanics work in game.

Basically this is my test room in the game, I see how the water animations are going, I make sure my mechanics for boat dock/fish swimming/casting are still able to work with me now having to set Region IDs in Tiled, etc.

My original plan was to test out and practice with this map to make sure I understood how to use Tiled and make sure my events worked together. However, without really having an idea of what this map should look like, I felt more stuck than anything and decided I would move to mapping the player’s home town first.

I decided to take things to ‘paper’ first. I wanted to use grid paper to sketch out my map first, and through trying to figure out how I was going to do it and what program I’d use I decided to work on it with Aseprite. Next time however I think I’ll work with the grid at half size of the original tiles as working with a large image in Aseprite had some performance issues on my (not so new) computer.

Overall, I ended up with a sketch like this:

No where near as detailed as I thought I’d do, but for this map, that was all I needed to get an idea of what I needed to map this town. I’m not done, but having a reference layer (hidden in the image below) in Tiled helped me to get this far:

You can see things got a bit changed up as I worked, but the foundation was there to make this map.

It will then be on this map that I’ll make sure all mechanics like fish swimming, spawning and casting work as planned. From there, once the game works as it did before the map changes, I’ll go ahead and continue mapping. I’m thinking I’ll map up to the second town and then work on a demo.

I figure I’ll have enough game content and players should get enough of a taste of the story for me to know if I should go forward or have to rework things.

IN OTHER NEWS

I switched from Patreon to Ko-Fi as explained in this previous blog post:

So now, the new footer for posts will be: