Oops! (When Things Go Wrong)

I had the next Phase Puzzle background post scheduled for today's blog, but something rather silly happened that I thought would be interesting to share instead. You never know what happens next in the world of game dev! ;)

You see, sometimes, things don't go as planned. And this was the case with the background I posted yesterday. Unfortunately, when we implemented the background in the game, we realized things looked waaay off:

See what I'm talking about?

For some reason we had ignored the fact that the barrels, when they move, pass underneath the user interface, which then blocks your vision in an annoying way (it totally blocks the door you're supposed to reach as well)! If we were to fix this by simply moving the camera up, then you wouldn't see the lower platform instead, so... Time for me to remake the background a bit :D

After some measuring, Teddy gave me new dimensions to work with. Basically, the entire map had to become smaller, both in height and width. No problem!

Things like this happen occasionally, and there's not much you can do other than fix the problem and move on. Luckily for me, resizing a map like this isn't particularly difficult! Basically I just have to move some layers around in Photoshop a bit and repaint any seams that look weird in doing so.

After about 15 minutes work, the map has been resized properly:

And now things look waaaay better in-game, wouldn't you agree?

Now, onward to the next background! :)