Been working on my project on stencyl and have been making steady progress on the prototype so far, the pumping mechanic is almost done and soon I’ll be moving onto basic enemy behavior, holding, and tethering.

I’ve been using some premade code for the platforming controls, which saves a lot of time, and right now I’m trying to develop all of the other aspects first just to get a working proof of concept, and may later refine it all into a more solid code with the help of others.

As for the nature of the game, I’m taking a design approach similar to super Mario world or kirby’s adventure, where I’m creating content to serve as building blocks for the stages, and the latter half of development is all about putting it together in different forms, kind of like on lunar magic or Mario maker. Each “world” will have it’s own content and may use content from previous worlds, but the idea is to have a system that is readily reusable and easy to modify.

While I would like to hoast enemy design contests, I’m not going to do anything real crazy yet till I get something working to show for. I think I may go and get ASEprite for creating graphics. There aren’t many options for mac and that seems like a real good one, though it costs $10 to get the full version and the ability to save.

I do have photoshop Cs4 but it’s maddeningly imprecise when it comes to pixel work, like I need to hit a pixel on some kind of sweet spot with the pencil tool. Plus using Photoshop for pixel work isn’t the best thing in the world since it’s not optimized for that scale of work.