Tai Ming Containers

As we've been working on these Tai Ming maps, we always end up at a point where we ask ourselves how many things should be breakable containers. Ideally, it would be super cool if everything was breakable, but that would take a ton of work and I think most of you know this game takes forever to make anyway! Plus, some things need to be non-breakable in order to serve as blockades - sometimes we don't want you to reach certain areas yet, after all. 

Anyway! One of the new breakable things here will be the bamboo thingies. We didn't plan on these to be breakable from the beginning, but we thought it's be kinda cool. Plus, what better opportunity to have a breakable that you can cut down piece by piece?! 

In order to make them varied and less static, we decided to split these decorations into multiple parts (see below):

First, we have the base, that will always be there (you won't be able to crush that part of the bamboo, sorry!), and a body which contains of a number of the right piece of the body sprites shown below, and ends with the left part, which is the top. Then there's a number of decorations which can be combined in different ways, added randomly. This way we can create bamboo in many different heights and with different decorations, and having the body made of multiple parts means you can remove one of them at a time, making for a pretty cool way of destroying this plant.

Above is the animations sheets Fred made for the bamboo, and below you can see it in action. Basically, you cut one piece of the bamboo off at a time, making it smaller as you go:

Another thing we weren't planning on using as breakables in the present, ruined version of this town was, ironically, the crates and barrels. The thought was that they had become overgrown and static, serving a new use as blockades instead: 

However, we ended up changing our minds - I mean, you've always been able to destroy barrels and crates before, would be kind of weird to change that around now, right? So, we ended up adding animations for that as well. And for the ones with greenery, there's an added little grass-effect as well:

Of course, on top of these there are pots as well, which means I believe Tai Ming is the most breakable container-heavy map in the game right now - and we've only barely finished the first map! Let's see if we can keep this up.. :)