Mystic Searches / The New 8-bit Heroes development

For anyone who is interested in the development of Mystic Searches, the game being developed for The New 8-bit Heroes documentary project, I just posted a long update on the screen tool we have developed to world build with. Hopefully some of you fellow homebrewing miscreants will enjoy seeing a bts snippet. Would love to hear your thoughts

https://vimeo.com/170566968

As requested in the video, I did watch the whole video from start to end without pausing last night when I got the Kickstarter email about it. Interesting stuff.
I'm guessing the game's screen tool exports the fully rendered map, rather then having the game engine render from object definitions, because the engine doesn't have the luxury of extra CPU memory and would give painfully long screen transition times otherwise.

Thanks for checking it out! I'm impressed that people actually took the time to watch it. It makes me happy that it's of interest

Yes, to answer your question, this tool exports Nametable data, Attribute data, and collision data for the entire map of screens, file by file, all referenced in a giant array of a look up table, which determines what is loaded when the screen is faded completely out upon navigating screen to screen. The collision data itself includes the references to the tile types, and objects check against that data every frame to determine behavior.

Thanks for the note!

You mentioned in your video that you'd get stuck if you mismatched the collision at the edges between screens. Have you considered just verifying that automatically when you export, instead of leaving it up to whether you notice?

Thanks for checking it out! Sure, that could be possible. But in this instance, pretty unnecessary, since now it's visually apparent. You can both see the ghosting of the adjacent screen AND in the larger map view. It was our solution to do away with the problem. But sure, that's not a terrible safety feature. Or even some hideable indicator that turns red in areas where there is inconsistency with edges. All things we've thought about. So far, though, the ghosting of the adjacent screens has made it pretty obvious!

Think Quick (1987, various computers) forced any edge walls (there's only solid wall/empty space) to be identical between adjacent rooms in its level editor.

I liked it, but it was very long and felt like a tutorial.

I would be more interested in shorter, higher-level overviews that don't try to explain everything.