I love Photoshop. I hope to one day write a program even a fraction as useful as that one. I stuck with the GM sprite editor for a while; it isn't terrible. But it gets on one's nerves after excessive use, so... get with Adobe if you haven't already homie.
I just spent the last week and a half drawing a completely new set of about 144 background tiles for the starting area. The starting area. I never thought I'd have the patience for something so daunting. If you ever see my few blog posts on my account here, you'll know I want this game to feel big. I think I'm starting to form the okay-looking snowflakes of my idea into a rolling snowball. We'll see in the coming months.
The article picture is of some of the new tiles tested with some floor pieces in a test room, the moving background and the player character. Here's some of the sheet before I made about twice as many:
I use a spacing of 2 px so it's easier to see where I'm clicking in my room editor. By the way, if you're using Game Maker's built in room editor with tiles, stop. Use GMare. It's free, better than the vanilla GM editor, easy to use and exports directly into your GM project. You might have a hard time with it if you don't understand how you can use tiles in Game Maker. Don't worry if you can't recognize what my tiles are; in this state it's a jigsaw puzzle. If the article picture didn't get distorted, hopefully it's clear that they resemble thick pipes (industrial-ish... nailed...it?).
I'm planning on designing more tiles for the background for the next few weeks, trying to really get a clear visual theme going while finding how the mechanics will mesh with the best environment. Typing that out and reading it back made me realize that may be one of the tougher challenges for this project - but just one of the many unknown territories I am excited to explore during development. There are plans for at least six areas which will undoubtedly contain many, many sub-areas. No official art is done for any other areas besides the beginning, however, several concept paintings are being worked on outside of code and tiling periods. I am happy to say I'll be putting images of those up as they are finished, so watch this game, or follow my profile or whatever you do on here. I'm new. I'm trying!!
