by Spooky graveyards
June 22, 2015 in Screenshots by Tom
It’s time for a quick round-up of the latest in-development changes in Lenna’s Inception!
Graphical Upgrade
Jay’s been hard at work on the new art style. So far, the overworld biomes are mostly complete, including (most recently) the graveyard biome and the Autumnal forest:
Building interiors are mostly done, although the church and laboratory still need doing, and we want to add a few alternative palettes too.
The previous Gameboy-like graphics will still be available as an option in the launcher. We think that the new graphics will be most popular overall, but recognize that the current graphics may be preferred by some.
You can keep up with Jay’s progress by following him on twitter: @SamuriFerret. He’s often posting screenshots of his latest work.
Title screens and menus
I’ve been working on in-game title screens and menus. Up until now, menu screens for loading save files and creating new save files have been in the launcher, as a temporary solution. Now when you launch the game, title screens play and afterwards you can configure certain options and choose which file to load.
The title screens are skippable.
Story Ending
We’ve been discussing and planning the next parts of the story, and Andrew is currently working on the music for the final boss. Some minor changes to things already in the game might be coming soon — in particular, the artifacts will be getting new designs — but we’re certain we can make the ending a very interesting one!
Engine
Lastly, I’ve done a significant amount of refactoring and redesigning in the engine to help support modding, reuse, and Jay’s improved graphics.
Things that can currently be modded are:
- All graphics, including tiles, sprites, fonts and UI elements
- Challenge modes, library books, quests and menus
- World and dungeon generation configuration
- Overworld set pieces and building interiors (using Tiled)
- Scripts (requiring the Scala 2.10 compiler)
- Drop pools and items (although, currently, items requiring new animations are hard to add)
- Music and sound effects
Mods that aren’t purely aesthetic are flagged when challenge mode scores are submitted to the leaderboards to make it hard to cheat.
After release of the next update I’ll write a post showing how some of these things can be modded!
Oh no! I come on here at least once a week to keep up with the progress of LI. This week I found a post that has been here for two days and has no comments!! I for one have great anticipation for Lenna. By the way, I’m totally stoked that you’re keeping the retro graphics as an option! Keep up the great work, team.
It’s looking great! I love how you give the player the option of choosing what graphics they want to use. Personally I love the more vibrant colours.
I can’t wait for the new update, love this game to bits, and really looking forward to seeing what a modding community can provide to this game. Keep up the fantatic work.
Hey, not to be a jerk, but do we have an ETA on the next version, for those interested in seeing how this plays out? I’ve beaten the 8th dungeon in my playthrough…or is that ending still a ways off?
The ending is still a way off. My current task is polishing what I’ve got so far, and I’ll be publishing a blog post about that tomorrow. If you really want to know the ending right now, reading all the books in the laboratory should give you a few insights that will help you figure it out for yourself. 😉