Flip and fall sequel - Devlog 1

Programming in FNA/monogame feels really alien to me. You really need to plan your code out a lot more meticulous than you would have with Godot, because everything down to managing what you are drawing and updating is up to you to implement.

I'm using LDTK to create my levels, with it's JSON parser to load them into my game. The whole level editor format is stored as one big json file which is super convenient.

I also started by using monogame aseprite to automatically convert aseprite files into loaded assets. This worked fine but I wanted to minimise the projects dependencies.

Later, I replaced this with my own solution, a script that I run at the start of debugging that uses the aseprite cli to compiles the a spritesheet image and outputs a json file for the metadata to group sprites into tags.

aseprite -b $file --list-tags --sheet AsepriteOut/$BASE.png > AsepriteOut/$BASE.json

aseprite -b flag turns off opening gui
file.aseprite --list-tags includes tag data in final json
--sheet outputs a spritesheet
AsepriteOut/filename.png spritesheet path
> AsepriteOut/filename.json Redirects the json which is printed out to the console into a new json file

This means when I export the final game, the aseprite files won't be shipped, just the spritesheet png and it's json metadata.

Using the new asprite importer, I started making some character animations. Now you might notice the character is bald.

This is because I made some hair physics, which is a chain of circles that fall downwards, and are pushed around when the player moves.

The run combined with the hair physics ends up looking like this!

I feel like an imposter given that this game copies a lot from Celeste. As I continue developing, I'm going to try and make a conscious effort to separate myself from inspirations.