New Directions Again

If you follow me on twitter or have seen any of my posts on /r/procgen or /r/pixelart recently, you'll have noticed I've been using the Toolkit a lot more for generating textures and artwork for games, rather than levels, as it was originally intended.

I've done this before in the past - usually by using toolkit functions in another project to draw things. Space-filling things like rough terrain, patterned floors, or brick walls. I've decided to make the sandbox an environment to do this in natively - since image files are completely transportable.

Construct 2 offers limited in-built support for this sort of thing however - compositing and manipulating images is beyond the functionality of the basic setup. One simple plugin - Paster by Scirra forums god R0j0hound - changes this. Hence, the toolkit is now available in two flavours. The plugin allows texture manipulation - but without it all the functions of the toolkit STILL WORK. It's only the freely-available functionality of the sandbox that is affected by not having the plugin. That said, it is a VERY neat plugin, and has yet to surprise me with unexpected results - ignore/avoid it at your peril, C2 users!

Anyway, with the toolkit being a viable environment for procedurally drawing artwork, some new things are in the pipeline. First of all - scripts are getting a little cumbersome.  I've gotten loops and indexing working now, so scripts can be simply looped over the same chunk of code. Next up is mathematical operators - so loop indexes can be used more effectively to control aspects of procedures. In the 'maybe' pipeline is functions, and checking expressions.

I may choose to fork the project soon, releasing a texture scripting engine separate from (but based upon) the Toolkit. This would be a dev tool freely-available on itch in both browser and downloadable form. Feedback welcome.