I was looking through the old art, back when I started this game around February. The engine was still coming along, and I was working out what it was going to be like and how it was going to work. The original setting was going to be more science fictional than fantasy, and when I decided to go folklore/fantasy was when I found that the art really started to take on a more interesting life of it's own.

The old art isn't bad at all, I don't think. The trees were probably the weakest, and I'm glad I took a day to create the new tree designs (since it's folklore and fantasy now, the trees play a bigger part), even though it was eight long hours of pixelling the trees. I think it ended up being worth it, in the end.

I looked over my notes and a lot of things had changed over time. I think a few of the really cool ideas I had were put on the back burner, for maybe a future project, just because I wasn't sure how to code them, and knew it would take a long time to get it right. One of the cooler ideas I had was waking the Winter Witch, which would freeze the lakes and make the trees snow covered and give you access to other areas. As much as I really liked the idea, figuring out how to easily implement this without a ton of work using Lua, Love2d, Simple TileD Interface, and TileD. I knew how to do such a thing when I created my own tile engines and editors back in the day- simple tileset swaps. But this seemed to be too complicated, based on the way TileD and etc where implemented.

Since someday I do want to do a game (perhaps an RPG) with changing seasons and the like, I might have to buckle down and right my own TileD importer, just to get the power and flexibility I need. But not with this project, that whole bit was unnecessary (and I replaced it with even cooler abilities and techniques for opening up new areas anyway), and didn't really fit into how the game was currently working. The game right now is very item based, and everything in the world (including mushrooms, flowers, etc) can be picked up and used as an item, giving you new (surprising) abilities.

Anyway, just a little peek at how it's evolved over the last few months. You can really see the graphics getting better and better with each iteration in the pictures above. It's really fascinating to watch, I think.