Topic: Lilly Looking Through (PC)

[TerraEsperZ]

Well, it's been a while since I've posted anything. More than a year in fact, and that wasn't even a full project, just two orphaned maps. But I never really stopped mapping you know; I just grew so obsessed with perfection that I became unable to live up to my unrealistic standards...

...or some stupid stuff like that.

Anyway, this single map has been a long time coming. I'd pretty much mapped the whole game as close to perfectly as it could be about two years ago, but then it all sat untouched until last week because I was never satisfied with my ideas for the overall presentation. Thankfully, I managed to get over that and it's at least functional if not that great-looking. It'll have to do.

Lilly Looking Through is a pretty small and somewhat unremarkable game. It's more or less a classic point-and-click adventure/puzzle game like those I used to play as a teenager, one where you have to "solve" the current area/screen before moving on to the next one. As a game, it's nothing great mind you; the puzzles are somewhat easy for the most part although they can get tedious, and there are some puzzles with color addition and subtraction that can get quite annoying if not outright frustrating toward the end. All in all, it's pretty short with only ten areas and the story, such as it is, is barely a prologue for something bigger that was never made.

HOWEVER, the game still manages to present an intriguing world through its visuals and ambient music, one I would have loved to explore further in a much longer sequel. The title of the game refers to the player's character, Lilly, finding a pair of magical goggles early on that, when worn, allows her to see but more importantly, to interact with her surroundings but in the past. What's more intriguing, you eventually realize that these past versions aren't all from the same time or era; in one location, you get to see it during the last ice age while in another, it's probably just the night before.

Here, then, is the whole thing in one single map :



DON'T save this one, as Imgur seems to convert any .png over 1 MB into a .jpg. I'll be sending JonLeung a link to the full quality file (~35 MB) as an official submission and you can grab that one then if you like.

[TerraEsperZ]

I also wanted to talk about how I mapped the whole thing "as close to perfectly as it could be" to quote myself.

You see, Lilly Looking Through is a game made in flash and the vast majority of its graphics are accessible from the get go. Basically, each of the ten areas has all of its static graphics laid out in one or two .png files; that includes the various background/middleground/foreground layers as well as every large and small static objects. This was great because the game uses a lot of alpha transparency across various layers, which would have been impossible to capture accurately while playing. I was basically able to reassemble every screen in GIMP from it's individual components, transparency and all, using the perfect source graphics instead of the very slightly altered version that Flash displays using subpixel rendering.

There were a bunch of animated effects that were trickier, like the animated reflection of the sun in the ocean that was partly hidden by several foreground objects. Thankfully, the game doesn't care if you edit or otherwise mess with its graphics files. So for the example above, I just went and deleted every graphic from the .png file except the ocean. When i got back to that area in the game, I could then see the background layer with the animated effects without any of the foreground objects in the way. I repeated that same process for every screen where a particular animation, lighting or color effect had to be captured in-game.

Hopefully, the result were worth the efforts.