Chronicles of the Alphabet's DEMO has few backgrounds that moves in a loop, common thing for pre-rendered backgrounds, as an attempt to make the backgrounds blend better with the game happening in it.

After thinking a bit, I've decided to make every background that presents water a "moving background", it just doesn't feel right to have some backgrounds with moving characteristics, like flags and sppining stuff, and every water stage being static since water is not supposed to be static at all.

This is how the biggest map to have water is right now (static) and how I want it to be (but with the water moving a bit faster, I'll have it rendered again):

The engine, however, was made for games that uses tilesets as background. So, in order to be able to use pre-rendered images, I have to split the background in 12 smaller images inside one big image, like this:

Each of these smaller images is one NPC spread into the map, so, each smaller images become, actually, an NPC sprite (very big sprites, in this case) and they are spread in a way their sprite meet pixel perfect with the sprite of the other NPC, this also allows movement by just changing very fast the sprite of some of those NPCs. Those 12 NPCs remain untouchable in a lower 2D layer than the player's.

Only two of those twelve smaller images above moves, each has 7 frames of animation, and even so, it used to lag a lot to load on my older laptop.

I started doing this game on a i3-4005U with 4 gigs of RAM... apparently, it was not enough to load this moving image in-game. It evetually runs smoothly, but just after staggering a lot, it can be a real burden as gameplay happens.

The biggest level with water, however, should be something much worse:

Since all of it presents water, all those 12 images must have animation frames and it will have to be 20 frames (max I can get) for each to get a smoother water... and in addition to that, this image itself is already larger than the previous one. Of course it would be a real headache playing it on a hardware close to my old laptops.

Since it is an indie game, I really want to be able to run it in the modest hardware possible, indie games are also supposed to be those modern games that are "the salvation" for modest hardware owners (like I was and already am for the majority of my time playing on PCs).

Based on this, I plan to have another modification to that DEMO that is already available.

The eighth comand's name will change from "SOUND" to "OPTIONS" and it will have inside "SOUNT TEST", "VOLUME" and "GRAPHICS".

Inside GRAPHICS, the player will be able to choose between 3 options:

1. Static Graphics - No background in the entire game will move;
2. Light Graphics - Just backgrounds with few frames in few images will move;
3. Full Graphics - All backgrounds that have animations will move.

Those are some stuff regarding my game that I started thinking not much time ago that I thought would be interesting to share with the community (and also to tell why the next update of the game will take some time to come).