Revamped Swamp biome

Biomes and art

  • Barrens. Some of my biomes looked dreadful. One example was the "barrens" which in my imagination would be cracked earth, but instead I was using some ultra dull bland brown colour. The associated vegetation was not exciting either. So I decided to redo that, in a DIY fashion. Result is in my opinion better, but still it looks a bit amateur hour stuff, but it's ok. I also wanted to replace those weird looking rocks with some vegetation, and I made some funky dead trees for the biome as well. Tick!
  • Swamp. Second victim of the art retouch was the swamp. Previously, it had lush vegetation but dark brown floor, effectively "mud". I didn't like that either. So it was replaced with another green tile with some 3-pixel flowers distributed. I like it better - I mean, it's green, what IRL city dweller wouldn't like green!
  • Savannah. This one was very ... orange, and it annoyed me too. So, I retouched it as well, to something more yellow, with some hints of green. Didn't have too much time for this one, so it needs ... work. But no more super-saturated orange. Done.
  • Desert. The desert was fine, but now with Savannah looking similar, I edited the colours just a bit.
  • No mushrooms in barrens. Apparently previously I was spawning mushrooms everywhere, so after looking at a level with cracked earth and mushrooms, realising it looks very wrong, I now set some biome constraints on the mushrooms to not spawn in barrens or desert.

Settings screen

Every game has to have some user-facing settings page. So, before the playtest, I want to have something in place and test it. Oh my mixed feelings about it. The categories are graphics, gameplay, controls, interface, audio. Audio was first and easiest to do. I added a couple of interface bits (e.g. enable/disable edge panning, or custom cursor) and that was fun and simple too.

But then I tried adding a couple of options in Graphics and I promptly regretted it. Because of my weird rendering setup, where I'm creating some framebuffer using RenderDevice and rendering the game there, well some graphics settings like MSAA or resolution, means that I need to recreate that framebuffer. But when I do that, I get some weird errors with no source, so ... I'm a bit blind. I think the solution is to tell the user to restart the game to see any changes - better than nothing I suppose!

Finally, I wanted to add re-binding key support, and also support binding keys, mouse buttons and joypads. That was another fun ride that took about 10h. But at the end, I do have proper functionality, including clearing keys and restoring to defaults, and even nice icons for keys and buttons!

And that's about it for now. I hope the worst is over with the settings, I do need to add a few more though, especially for the gameplay section. Most will be irrelevant for the World Forge, but it's nice to have something in place so that people play with (and test :)).