To kick off this week's update, I wanted to take a moment to thank Jan Rochat, who became our first Github sponsor! His incredibly generous contribution helped reach our primary sponsorship goal, so I've increased it to see if we can get to $500 a month now. Because of this, his name is now on the boot credits.
Anyone who sponsors PV8 on Github for $25 a month or more will be added to this new section of the boot screen, even if you only sponsor for a single month. Starting next month, I'll be adding all of the names of those people that purchased PV8. I want to highlight all of those that helped keep PV8 moving forward over the past few years.
As for last week's update, I don't have much to show off. I am still hacking away at the new Draw Tool for defining system colors, building palettes, and editing sprites. As I work on simplifying all of these activities, it's making me rethink how I want the underlying render system to work. I'll have some more updates next week, but I did post a few of my raw thoughts on Discord early in the week on how this will all work out.
The main focus of last week was converting the tool designs from PSDs to Aseprite files. I've slowly been doing this over the past few months, but I now have a perfect workflow going thanks to some custom scripts I wrote. Also, migrating the designs over and cleaning up the undocumented sprite builder logic lays out the groundwork to use the new Meta Sprite API. More on that in the upcoming weeks.
All of the Aseprite files are in the next commit going out to Github. So you'll have access to everything I use to build PV8's tools, including these new scripts.
My latest scrip exports each of the layers into individual sprites and creates a sprites.png and tilemap.png file. I anticipate that you'll find some use in your games.
I expect the next two weeks to be challenging as I try to get v0.9.8 ready for release. Given some of the roadblocks I ran into last week, I want to get this next update right because it may require migrating existing art over to the new workflow. I'll know by the end of this week if I can still hit my end of the month goal.
I'll check in next week with more updates!