Progress on Blackmask presses on as I’m still making environments. It’s an uphill climb, but I can’t get discouraged.

For a short moment, I’ve been learning Pxyel Edit as it’s makes it easier to create repeatable tile sets. The program’s missing so many features that I ended up going back to learning more tricks in Aseprite.

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I got started learning the Unity Engine! So far, I spent most of my time learning the interface and importing my environment tiles. I got stumped by things like assets not scaling right or blurry.

All this work is opening my mind to flaws I had with the tile sets. Doing this also showed me the issues of keeping my art assets in proportion. There’s much to improve with my environment stuff, but it’s a muscle I need to work.

Later, I made a rough mockup of how an environment could look in Blackmask. It’s different from previous environments in the pre-alpha videos. It might be more elaborate than an actual Game Boy game, but I don’t have those limits for real. It shows enough depth to keep the gameplay elements separate from the background.

Making a night environment is more tricky since Cole blends in the backgrounds too much for me. Overall, many people seem to like the look despite how rough the art looks to me. There’s still so much to learn, and I still need to see all of this in motion, but I’m taking it one step at a time.

All in all, I’m still truckin’ literally and figuratively, so expect these posts to continue. Stop by my Twitch streams and check out the short articles I wrote like my book recommendations, and while I continue working on more stuff.