Text Layers

Published on 2017-11-04 in µGame.

Today I spent practically whole day coding, and added support for text layers to the tile engine. Behold:

Initially I didn’t want to add another kind of layer just for this — it would have to be quite different than the grid layer, as the squares would be 8x8 pixels and the tile selection would need to be a whole byte, not 4 bits, plus I only need 4 colors in the font, so 2 bits per pixel…

So I got this idea: what if I make it a standard grid layer, with 16x16 tiles, but then generate a bank that has the text rendered on the tiles, and just display that. I quickly coded the proof of concept for that, and it worked, except it was horrendously slow and used a lot of memory.

So I decided to go for a new layer type after all. Since I only use 128 charcters from ASCII, I made the highest bit switch between two parts of the palette — so I can have text in two colors. I’m also not using the 32 control charcters at the beginning of ASCII right now, but I could put some extra characters in there, things like symbols for weapons and armor, arrows and buttons, HP and MP, hearts, stars, cat paws, etc.