AuthorTopic: Sprytile - Build 3D scenes with 2D tiles, a tool for Blender  (Read 4999 times)

Offline ZeroByte

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Hi! I'm building an addon called Sprytile that gives Blender 2D tilemap tools. It's basically Crocotile, but for Blender.



I've been working on it on and off for 4 months now and it's been out on itch.io about a week. I'll be continuing to build up features and logging my progress here.

I hope people here can give it a go. It's available on itch.io and is free as in beer and speech, but any support is greatly appreciated.



« Last Edit: April 15, 2017, 05:44:13 pm by ZeroByte »

Offline ZeroByte

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Re: Sprytile - 2D Tilemaps for Blender

Reply #1 on: April 08, 2017, 06:38:58 pm
A WIP model that's taking a backseat to development of the add on is a low spec style Kestrel from FTL.







Which is a little silly because a low spec Kestrel was one of the reasons why I wanted to build this add on in the first place.

Offline ZeroByte

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Re: Sprytile - 2D Tilemaps for Blender

Reply #2 on: April 09, 2017, 08:26:17 am
I wrote up a long devlog post for the TIGSource forums that I might as well post here.


Background

Way way way back as an intern, when I was a fresh faced technical artist wannabe (before I local industry realities sunk in) I had built a tilemap painting script for 3DS Max after observing an artist build Animal Crossing style environments by laboriously UV mapping each face to a tile. I never took it further than that early prototype but the idea has stuck with me all this time.

Flash forward to sometime last year when I saw Crocotile and it was all that I had wanted all this time! Except… in the intervening years I've grown very fond of Blender and I wanted those tilemap tools inside my Blender workflow.


Development

I started development in the end of October 2016 and had a functional tool around mid November. It turned out that I started work on Sprytile at a fortuitous time because support for a fast mesh raycast function had just been recently rolled into Blender.

To figure out the workflow and bugs in Sprytile, I ate my own dogfood by building the model below.


Clicky to view the model in Sketchfab

I had free time over the 2016 holidays so a lot of critical work on Sprytile was completed then. Then my actual job got hectic early in 2017 so work on Sprytile slowed quite a bit. Nice thing about doing this project on GitHub? Automatic work graphs!


I had gotten Sprytile to a level where I was confident with its functionality around the end of January, and had actually wanted to have it out for the Global Game Jam but I knew I was missing something important for Sprytile to get any traction at all. I needed docs and tutorials!

Over February and March, I was making small iterative improvements to Sprytile while wrestling with the documentation and tutorials. At first I tried jumping straight into making a video tutorial but that really did not end up well. So many wasted hours getting frustrated with myself.

What ended up working better for me was putting together a written quick start tutorial and then making the tutorial video based off that. Production of the video tutorial was still a pain and I'm not entirely happy with it especially with the sound quality and my speech, but by this time I was letting perfect become the enemy of good enough and I really wanted to get Sprytile out the door.


Release

I decided my self imposed deadline for release would be March 30. All this time I've had an itch.io page created and parked and have been pecking away at it over the course of the development.

Some things that took me a while to figure out with presentation on itch:

- If you're uploading gifs, the first frame should be an interesting image since they start out paused.
- Check how the site looks on mobile! A lot of visitors come in by mobile. Itch has a great responsive design, but test anyway.
- If you're going to use itch.io's message boards, create some topics ahead of time to set the tone and invite others to use it.

With my tutorials and page done the best I could, I made the itch.io page public and got to work promoting Sprytile.

My first stop was over to Twitter where I didn't really have a following but I figured #hashtags would help. After Twitter, I hit a few relevant subreddits to promote Sprytile there too. There was a snag with r/gamedev since links to itch.io are auto flagged by their bot but a few PMs with their helpful moderators sorted it out.

I'm not sure what I expected (not having goals set is probably bad) but the reception on the first day of release was so lukewarm it bummed me out.

Until @metkis on Twitter made a great looking render with Sprytile.

His tweet helped organically promote Sprytile on Twitter. I'm not even sure how he found Sprytile but I'm so grateful he did. It briefly made my notifications a nice mess and according to analytics, has made Twitter the greatest driver of traffic to my itch.io page.


Project Management

One great thing about making Sprytile an opensource project is the ecosystem surrounding OSS. For feature and bug tracking, I use GitHub issues. This is further augmented by waffle.io which turns GitHub issues into a nice Trello-like kanban board.

Surprisingly, GitHub has driven roughly the same amount of traffic to itch.io as my highest traffic reddit post.


Tech Support and Documentation

Technical support for users has been a mishmash of social media and github so far. It would be nice to have it centralized in GitHub issues but I understand that that's not really an attractive proposition for non technical users.

I've fixed a couple of egregious bugs and low hanging fruit features since release based on user feedback so support is working at least.

To make it easier to keep the addon up to date, I've also implemented an opensource blender update system.

Some of the interactions I've had with users also reinforced the importance of good documentation and tutorials and where my current ones are lacking. For example, the GameFromScratch YouTube channel covered Sprytile and started out as an even better tutorial video than my own until later when my documentation clearly failed the user.


Future Feature Development

From my own personal use of Sprytile, I already have some ideas for tools that would speed up the process of building with tile maps. But with Sprytile's release, feature development now needs to be balanced between writing docs/tutorials, bug fixes, and features that users want. The highest priority for now is to implement other tile map editor tools before the more specialized features that I have in mind.

Development has been relatively speedy since release but I suspect that's just momentum, I probably can't keep up this pace for the entire cycle. Sprytile is a side project that I work on after actual job and over the weekends.

I'm not sure when I would consider Sprytile complete but I'm very excited to see what people can make with it!

Offline ZeroByte

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Re: Sprytile - 2D Tilemaps for Blender

Reply #3 on: April 15, 2017, 04:21:10 am

A fill tool is implemented! Interest in Sprytile seems to have flatlined a week after release. I did not realize how much marketing/promotion this project will need. I might try promoting it more in the run up to Ludum Dare 38.

Offline surt

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Re: Sprytile - 2D Tilemaps for Blender

Reply #4 on: April 15, 2017, 06:32:10 am
I do think you should change your terminology.
This isn't what I'd call a tile map, rather a tile-based model.

I would love to see something like this combined with actual tile mapping, have a 3D grid (ideally unbounded) indexing a list of tile-based models. Would be great for making maps like the Ultima Underworlds.

Offline ZeroByte

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Re: Sprytile - 2D Tilemaps for Blender

Reply #5 on: April 15, 2017, 06:44:51 am
Yeah, I've been finding that the terminology has been a challenge too in the TIGSource thread. It's something I have to think about.

Here's a sloppy speed model video I just made. I need a new tileset, getting bored with this one.

https://youtu.be/ZylgMXlcM4Y

Oh, and thanks for actively submitting issues to the github repo, Surt!
« Last Edit: April 15, 2017, 06:48:40 am by ZeroByte »