Back to Work (1/13)

Greetings from 2025!
Sorry for being late with this update, turns out the holidays took more out of me than I thought. But I'm back now, and have a good amount to share today.

After releasing a Suki game to my patrons and taking a break last month, I went back to working on Maya, and specifically the level editor. My main goal for a while now has been to add in support for multiple tilemap layers: Instead of the one single layer I've had to work with up until this point, I want to have the option to work on multiple layers, like layers in drawing software. Different layers would have different properties (some can be hazardous, some can be platforms, some can be backgrounds, etc.), and you could freely change their color, sorting order, sprites, etc. In theory this would make for a really powerful level editor with a lot of flexibility

...But in practice this shit is really hard and takes a while, so this is as far as I've gotten with it:

Here's the first real test of working with multiple layers: in this case the main tilemap layer and two layers used for spikes, one for embedding them in flat surfaces and another for vertical walls. Functionally this is pretty good already, but I had to break a lot of things in order to get it to work (in particular saving and loading is completely broken, and currently that's the only way I can test the levels). So yeah, still a lot of work to do here, and a lot of it is tedious and not at all glamorous systems programming.

So while that's been going on, I also starting working on a new animation for Maya!

Still a work in progress of course, but I'm already pretty happy with this motion here. The idea is that she'd be doing this sort of skip/hopping motion as her run, as at this size it's the only way she can get her fat butt off the ground long enough for any decent stride
 
Currently the plan is that she'd end up in this form at some point in the 3rd area of the game themed around cake. And for now that is all I'll say about it.

As for Suki game, I plan on getting back to work on that this week, with the goal of trying to release another patron build by this time next. I can't guarantee that I'll reach that, but for now at least I plan to alternate between projects each week. Once A Suki game is complete, it'll be released publicly for free, so by that point I'm aiming to have Maya ready and playable for patrons instead.

And that'll be all for this week. As always, thank you for reading. Until next time!