Iolva

The game looks really cute. Did you make the graphics yourself?

Can you upload this to scirra's arcade so it's easier for us to test out?

Just curious.

I'm an artist, so not a potential customer, but I would suggest you animate them for others.

Planets work well without being animated, but stars are big burning balls of gas, so probably resolve better with some animation. Having those currents rolling around on the surface a bit, and little flares bubbling off the sides.

Realistically, of course these changes are slow since stars are so big, but for effect, sometimes what looks right is better than what is.

JamesXXXYZ

I see. So, you should be able to also store the prior X and Y, compare it to the new one, and get the angle of movement, right?

Or maybe there's another problem I'm not seeing.

Are these animated?

JamesXXXYZ

I don't understand the way you're trying to do it. There shouldn't be any key presses to change direction if it's following a path.

In order to get the appropriate directional facing frame for a sprite, the movement of which is being controlled programmatically like this (path finding), you need to poll its vector.

You can do that by comparing its position last frame and this frame, if you're not using physics. If you don't have walk/run or anything like that, you can throw out the magnitude and just keep the angle, which you can convert into the frame you want.

JamesXXXYZ

Sorry, I don't understand your problem. Can you rephrase, or explain more?

If your topview sprite is pointed North, that would mean your Iso sprite is pointed at the angle that corresponds to North in the top view grid (such as up and right, or up and left, depending on how you translate it).

Rotate speed?

Honestly, the idea is pretty exciting. A persistent world is one of the only moderately reliable ways to both monetize and avoid piracy issues (sure, there are advertisements, and there's always the possibility of pirate servers, but those are both pretty minor in both regards).

Doing it with C2 would be a game changer. Particularly if somebody made it really convenient and accessible...

rexrainbow you're amazing!

Congratulations!

It's always a great feeling when you start seeing a little bit of return from something you've put your heart into.

How are you liking the ads Admob serves up? Have you found them appropriate to the game?

rexrainbow

Seems to work well, although I can't tell much without obstacles in the way to trip it up.

However, I am seeing some aesthetically odd results.

For example:

[attachment=0:3scttim7][/attachment:3scttim7]

Nine steps, yes, it's technically an acceptable path, and one of the shortest paths, but visually it's not the shortest path (just one of the shortest options given the tiles).

Maybe you can add in a distance check, such that it will choose the shortest path that also *looks like* the shortest path, in that it's also the shortest linear distance?

Just an idea.

tunepunk

Yes, something like that. However, as in your example, you wouldn't necessarily be limited to full tile collision only, if you rendered it out as an alternate map and did away with the array based pathing.

You can use arbitrary collision bodies.

[attachment=0:34o2jhrb][/attachment:34o2jhrb]

Make sense?

It's basically like this:

All the AI is really playing the game on map A, but their movements are copied by the sprites on map B (after applying the isometric translation to the coordinates).

You can hide map A if you want, off screen, or just don't render it if that's easy. Or even use it as a mini-map in the corner.

So you can use arbitrary collision shapes, and as small or large a cell size for pathing as you want.

However, if you want to force your sprites to stop in the center of tiles for tile-based movement (maybe you're making chess, or a rogue-like), and you only have those limited collision cases, then your way is actually pretty good.

rexrainbow

Thanks! I'll check that out.

You mean you're writing your own pathfinding to use the array? It looks like it could work.

All of these tiles are quads in an even grid, why not redraw the map as squares (rotated) in a normal grid and do the pathfinding there with the out of the box solution, and then copy the results by translating the coordinates to the isometric display?

Can you set one sprite so its movement is dependent on another sprite's movement?

e.g. Sprite 1 moves down, and Sprite 2 moves at an isometric angle the same distance as sprite 1 moved down?

"Is a platformer still the best idea for this?"

Yes. A thousand times yes! Side-view platformer is hands down the best perspective for indies due to the ease of art asset creation.

Top view is also easy, but for having anything like jumping it becomes much more difficult for the player to resolve what's going on, since heights in that perspective are tricky to convey.

"If you want the background to just repeat and play on a mobile phone or tablet, would 2k by 2k save much space?"

If you're worried about space, use tiles. Don't use a huge background image.

"Check out my first hand drawn and scanned tank. I have not colorized the wheels yet.

I will scale this tank down more, this is just start. What do you think?"

It looks good so far! The wheels are the trickiest part, though. Make sure you use some photo references to get the details and colors right.