Hello Defold Community! I want to start out by saying boy is there an adventure on the horizon. Quick summary about myself I’m mainly a pixel artist.
I’ve been working with cartoonist style pixel art for quite some time including animations, tile sets, and character creation. I’ve made platformers, lite rpgs, and turn based strategy games. I’ve never built a game for profit instead mainly super small condensed projects in which I’ve learned C++ and C#. So now I’m undertaking a new task to complete a full project and release it on steam, this project as of right now is aptly named Aetheria & The Seven Sins Of Sanctuary, this game is a terraria like with an emphasis on combat particularly bullet hell. I have designed a lot of the art and would love feedback when it comes to it! Alternatively as the game progresses more I may reveal more of the GDD that set’s it apart from many of its ilk. Unfortunately I feel like the 2D sandbox genre has been extremely stagnant as of late and that may have something to do with scope, design direction, and or just completely being shoved down to the point of not getting the lime light. I’ve found a few hopeful games, but nothing that’s grabbed my attention quite like Terraria. The funny thing is I used to never like pixel art games until Terraria(No Joke Here Either). The thing I believe I was missing was understanding that pixel art games can still be extremely well made in terms of core mechanics and gameplay. I know my limitations so I may inquire about certain parts of LUA, although I’m willing to learn and it should be easier considering its a higher level language than most of what I already use, I’m not going to understate what LUA is capable of after all here I am deciding to use Defold to create a 2D Sandbox Bullet Hell. Honestly doing this with a team would have been nice, but my teams always get sidetracked and our projects haven’t been lining up to what I want to see brought to life. So regardless of how long it takes I will pursue this game and breath life into my idea! The upcoming focus will be on tile map auto-tiling creation(See Images Below). So generally this will be setting up neighbor checks and physically coming up with a solution for identifying blocks, my current thought on it is to handle this by using an preassigned ID and checking an array in a 3x3 around the block. I may make a small tool to help me do this visually as sometimes I find that best. I should add if anyone in the community has a better ideal I’m all ears(Really Eyes, look you know what I mean 
). For now though so I don’t leave you empty handed I guess some of the game art might be a good tease as to the future.
Dirt/Stone Tiles(Note There is also fused variants IE when stone comes into contact with dirt:
Male/Female Characters, To note in this I decided to keep it simple to allow for player customization male and female are generally similar the difference will be in hairstyle choices I’ve also made it so that the player can be built in stages Head(Helmet, Hair), Chest(Shirt, Body Armor), Hands(Baubles, Gloves), Legs(Pants, Leg Armor), and Feet(Boots, Shoes).
With that in mind I think that wraps DevLog#001, welcome to a new adventure I look forward to its future!
P.S. If you want to reach out or have any ideas feel free to comment or shoot me a DM I will keep up with this thread.