Hey everyone, a quick update since I just updated a couple days ago...
I've been tweaking the dark woods set a bit so it's more distinct and uses colors that do not lean too heavily on the palette of the cemetery areas and made some HUD changes with Dale's help to get the treasure pickup extra life functionality working. In addition, I created the a few test screens for the village area and populated both dark woods and village zones with hidden items, hidden rooms, NPC's, checkpoints, health pickups, treasure, enemies and traps. I will be returning later to replace the enemies with the ones made specific for these zones at a later time. For windows of the village I created a game object that sits on top of the background window tile. Tonight, I will be setting timers to have those blink on and off. I had to create two 1X2 game objects so I can really only add 2 enemies or 2 NPC since the windows take up 2 monster slots.
I'll be adding some NPC lore later in the week to these village areas about what happened to the land since you've been dead for a number of years when you start the game.
I am not truly happy with these colors or the scale of the buildings...If had scrolling setup to move in both directions, I would create large, multi-screen structures that would make more sense scale wise. I made widen them a unit or two and go a little higher. That may help.
Let me know what you all think and if you have any ideas to improve any of this. Its slowly getting better, my early levels were really flat!