Smalltown Grocery – DevLog 1

I haven’t had a lot of time to work on this game, but I’ve done a few things.

Thanks to a few people from the GMC, I have a few game title suggestions to make the game sound more fun/exciting:  “Cleanup In Aisle 3″, “Attention Shoppers”, and “Checkout”.  I haven’t made up my mind about the title, whether keeping it as “Smalltown Grocery” or changing it, but the suggestions definitely help get the thought processes flowing.

Mostly, I’ve been working on sprites.  I’ve started an ‘art assets needed’ list and have been working through it, though slowly.  I’ve made a customer sprite and an employee sprite by modifying the person sprite in two different ways.  I’m not perfectly happy with it — I feel like I could make parts and pieces more interchangeable and modifiable if I separate them out more.  For instance; leg sprites, upper body sprites, head sprites — then combine them and color-blend them with code for variety.  But for now, I have a brownish customer and a black & white employee.  I also created a shadow to help contrast against the floor.  Now I’ll have to give everything else shadows — doh!

I’m a little stuck with how I want to go about coding the game, as far as laying out the store’s floorplan.  My shelves will fit into 32 x 32 grid squares, so I was thinking of using grid collision and pathfinding.  However, I don’t want my walls to be 32 pixels thick.  I want them to be 4 pixels thick.  So, I’m trying to figure out how to manage the two different sizings, but I really have no clue about where to begin.  I found a write-up about using something called HAA* pathfinding to do this, but it was beyond my ability.  Trying to read and comprehend it was turning my brain to mush.  Maybe with more study and patience I will find a solution, but for now I think I’ll keep working on sprites.

So, that pretty much sums up my progress.  Not much this week.  Probably not much next week, either, but we’ll see.