Tonight's session saw me making a few changes to Citadel's graphics scale. Previously, I was using the C64's resolution, i.e. all my game tiles set to 32x32 pixels. This is all well and good if I merely wanted to emulate the C64 and never zoom in or out; but seeing as I do want to zoom, some changes and tweaks were necessary.
The biggest alteration involved creating a brand new tileset with 64x64 tiles, tweaking the sprite sizes to match, and adjusting the viewport settings within Game Maker to a more appropriate zoom. I also took the liberty of creating a tilesize constant, which I then used throughout the code; in future, should I ever change the tile size again, most of the fiddly work I did tonight will be done for me just by changing one value in the editor.
I rounded off the evening by doing some research into why my tiles were blurry; it turns out that Game Maker only allows texture pages of 2048x2048, and automatically scales images that are too big. So not only were my tiles getting compacted to an eighth of their intended size, they were getting stretched back out again when drawn to the screen. It's often amazing how much a game can be transformed with just a couple of hours' work. Here's hoping this productivity continues. :)
