Guitar Fretter Progress and Asset Pipeline Improvements

Clip Studio Paint workspace, the creatures animation frames clean outlines.

I mentioned recently that Guitar Fretter is getting a visual update and splitting into two versions: the full paid version and a useful yet less featured free version.

All that's coming along. Such a hand-wavy status but true.

Solar2D Gratitude

I'm so thankful that Solar2D came along as the open source continuation of the Corona SDK. I put a lot of work in to the Lua built version of Guitar Fretter. I was exploring and building of a future path for the game using Unity. I see that work as long term future for the game not the soon path though. Because I can work so much faster building on the fully finished version originally built using the Corona SDK. Going open source means fresh life and freedom for that game platform.

Screen Layout and Helper Script

This is how the start screen layout project file looks in Clip Studio Paint.

My main focus for this update is to make it easier to keep making visual improvements to Guitar Fretter. That's been a hodge-podge process I'm working to improve. Way back in the day, I used Adobe Fireworks to create the screen layouts. Later migrated to Photoshop, and now I'm using a combination of Clip Studio Paint and the Gnu Image Manipulation Program.

Getting the screens composed visually helps me a lot. To go from visual layout to showing properly in the game means I need to export images at proper resolutions and get the relative sizes and positions of all those exported images from a given screen layout.

I had something that mostly worked but it used Photoshop and I've chosen to use the other tools I mentioned instead. For secret reasons.

So as I'm designing and building the new screens with updated visual designs I've also been building some scripts to help the process go faster. I have a Python script that takes a layered PSD file, exports the images, and positions. I was hoping to have a pattern of using subfolders to store images for each screen separately. It seems Solar2D has a quirk with loading resolution independent images from a subfolder in the game's main directory. It only loads the low resolution. If I use the main directory it chooses the image resolution given the device it's running on. Every image in Guitar Fretter has 4 different size variants: 1x, 2.5x, 3x, 4x. Explore the game-assets.py gist to see how it works.

More to come, soon I hope.

The new asset pipeline process is coming along. The new animations and updated look is coming along. I want to promise a date for the update but know that's not really a good idea for either of us. It's sooner than later. More likely Q1 of 2021 than later.