(Yikes, set that site bg back to somethin' dark again!)
a) A successful little game dev experiment I guess.
b) It's possible to lose your pig because he's not confined to the viewable area; you can fly out of the screen and never find your way back.
c) When you die, you have to reload the page to start over.
d) No pause (just go barely out of screen for as long as needed, for same effect)
e) Aliens all glide by at the same exact speed. Some varied (but still constant) speeds would be an easy and effective improvement, well within the scope of the project.
f) Since the pig's hitbox covers only the front part of his body it's possible to exploit this by staying behind aliens where they can't hit you and simply fly over them, from behind, and take them out, letting them shoot your invincible rear all they want.
g) Similarly, since aliens don't fire until they're fully in-screen, yet always susceptible to your fire, you can stay at the front of screen and take them out while they're defenseless.
h) You get points for getting hit??
i) E,S,D,F?? Why not the standard W,A,S,D?
j) Piggy's simple cartoony black-outlined illustrated style clashes with the rest of the game pretty bad.
h) Piggy quickly gets overpowered and the aliens no longer stand a chance. Capping aliens on-screen at 5 could maybe be increased.
k) Bacon.
. . .oh wait this is the tile wizard thread . . .
Just getting back into it . . . haven't tried everything yet but . . .
1) Are the two "nag" screens really necessary? Why not a readme in the root DIR with the .jar? Not a huge deal. It is a free, and I am thankful you're sharing it. My little group isn't so fast to give tools away for free, but I think you're doing a good thing.
---PALETTE---
2a) Color picking/management is cumbersome. The way you have to click the "Set Palette Color" square to save the new color into the "Palette" and then click a place on the "Color Quickbar" to set it there. Can we get a more typical color selection method? Look at Photoshop's color picker, or even the default OS color picker. Could your app just call the OS picker?
2b) Need to be able to set a color for the left mouse and different color for right mouse buttons. This will speed up drawing.
2c) Keep numbers on all "Color Quickbar" swatches visible at all times. Find a new way to convey which swatch is currently picked. Pro Motion does it by drawing a white line and black line horizontally across the swatch, in the middle.
2d) Allow users to enter RGB values manually. They may already have a palette and they'll want to get they're palette easily available to draw from. Is the quickest way to do this to load an image a CTRL+CLICK every color in it? What if, instead of only native palette files, you could load an indexed image and grab it's palette/color table automatically, inputting it into the "Palette".
2e) Does a color HAVE to be in the "Color Quickbar" (CQ) before you can draw with it? If so, the CQ is actually the app's drawing palette and the "Palette" is just swatch storage, like Adobe Illustrator.
3) When I want to start a new session with a different tile size I have to quit and restart the app??
4) If I'm on page 20, how do I get back to page 1? Click 'Back', 19 times??
5) When in "Override" mode, placing tiles in the "Tile Tester", how do I select a different tile to paste down without drawing on the tile I select? Why can't you select the top gray title bar that turns green when selected?
6) Needs a tilemap - a little panel with all tiles in the session, that you can pick from when pasting tiles into the "Tile Tester". Otherwise you have to page through all tiles to find the one you want? Ouch! A tilemap you can use to select from when in "Override" would be giant.
7) When in "Override" mode allow CTRL+CLICKing on already pasted in tiles, in the "Tile Tester" to automatically select them for pasting, just like an eyedropper shortcut when drawing. This would be HUGE.
8 ) Nix the 4 1:1 tile previews in the top right and give each "Tile Editing" slot view options - 1x, 2x, max, etc. (conflicts with #9)
9) When I create a new session and choose to my tile dimension settings to be 8x8, why only four per page, still? Quantity of "Tile Editing" slots per page should depend on the total height. With an 8x8 tile, there's a ton of wasted space, vertically. (conflicts with #8)
10) And regardless of what tile size is used, there's also wasted space horizontally. That gray/green title bar and buttons doesn't need to be so huge-ishly huge-like. App window space is precious, you're using a fixed window size afterall.
11) Can you draw animation frames for tiles in the app or just preview it's animation?
12) Give EVERYTHING keyboard shortcuts.
13) If the "Tile Tester" only has two modes (default and override), two buttons is redundant, just use one toggle button. Simply UI!
14) "Tile Tester" "Override" mode brushes! Think of how much work is involved in filling the "Tile Tester" with an 8x8 grass tile so you can test your rock tiles within it here and there. Ever seen the Warcraft II map editor it had three sizes of brushes to quickly plop down tiles. I'm asking for pretty much the same thing.
15 ) Pop-ups (like the one that asks you if you want to quit when you hit the X and the animation ones, appear arbitrarily in the middle of my left monitor, even though the Tile Wizard is in my right mon. I suggest finding the app's center for the pop-up location.
sincerely,
Lord of Feature Creep and Destruction