Monday Screenshot 5/25: Dealing with High Resolution

Raptisoft

The original Solomon's Keep was designed for iPhone... a very small screen!  This worked well for the game design, because I wanted small rooms, compact levels, "tiny adventure."

I still want all that!  A problem arises, however, due to the amount of screen real-estate that is visible when you're standing around.

So here I have the player character standing in the center of the screen (just behind the wall, you can see the top of his head).

On the left side of this image, you can see the "undesirable" result-- the player has never visited the room on the bottom, but because that room has lights in it, he's able to see what's there.  That's not fair!  So in addition to doing spell work this week, I had to invest some time in hiding things that couldn't possibly be visible.  It's a fairly complex endeavor, because it's not so cut and dry-- I couldn't use pure raycasting because I do want, say, a room next door to you to be completely visible-- I just don't want a room that you've never been in, that's far away, to reveal itself.

It was a little more work than I expected, but ultimately it worked out.  Kinda a boring screenshot and update, but I chose this over showing more spell effects because this relates to the core gameplay more, and it's a sort of technical problem that never arose in the original iPhone game.

Tears_Of_Asariel

i can see how that would be a bit trickier to deal with, how did you make it work? just something that prevents you from seeing a room unless its directly connected or already been traveled to? 

and dont worry about "boring" screenshots, i kinda prefer that some stuff is hidden like spells, just because the anticipation makes it that much more satisfying when its finally unveiled, and if you ever have an issue like before where you were working on the UI and didnt want to show us, for the monay SS, just show us a pic of kittens and puppies playing or something lol, just knowing your still working on it is enough for me :P

windslayer

Just for the record, are we still having the "no shadow" option? The one that makes your surrounding less dark?

Tears_Of_Asariel

i would hope so, i know rapti wanted it to be a dark and gloomy game, but not allowing us to somehow brighten it (either because of them not having good eyes or because they just dont want to play a game so dark) would be silly because it would just be reducing the player base 

i wouldnt think theres that much of an advantage a player would have by removing the gloom besides esthetics, and possibly with a monster like that invisible shadow, or anything similar rapti might come up with, but a skilled player wouldnt need to "see" the shadow creature to determine its location and kill it, and a player chosing to remove the gloom just for a brighter gameplay would only be hurting themselves by taking a layer of game immersion away

xglsuperbounce

He said there would be a gamma slider