Bye Bye Black screen!#

I’ve been shooting some clays on clay-bang and it’s starting to look a little lifeless. Just shooting clays on a black screen, all of them with dreams and they yearn to be flown on an open range. Well, let’s change that by adding a background image. I want to keep a pixelated look to the game so it had to be pixel art. There are different tools like piskel but I have an iPad just gathering dust since college. What if I used Procreate to make it?

Turns out, it is very possible. After following an online tutorial, I created a 1 pixel block brush. I then went out to draw a 1920 by 1080 background, pixel by pixel…

Screen Resolutions#

Around the 366th pixel, I started thinking “there has to be a better way”. After visiting some forums, I found out that 360 x 640 resolutions is the most popular one. The main reason why it’s so popular is because it’s easily scalable. At 200%, this can fit a 720p screen and at 300% it can fit into 1080p and so on. This divided the amount of drawing I needed to do by a third! I still had to handdraw it but I was much happier this time around.

Now we have a crudely drawn background! It was a test in patience and ended up being very relaxing as time went on. I’m very proud of it.

Loading a background into Love2d#

Now that we have our background, loading it into love2d is easy. Inside of your main.lua file, create the Image in love.load() and then call it in draw() I’m going to scale it since I usually do 720p if I’m not on my monitor.

function love.load()
  Background = love.graphics.newImage("assets/background.png")
end

function love.update(dt)
end

function love.draw()
  local scaleX = love.graphics.getWidth() / Background:getWidth()
  local scaleY = love.graphics.getHeight() / Background:getHeight()
  love.graphics.draw(Background, 0, 0, 0, scaleX, scaleY)
end

And now we have clay bang with a background! Now that I have this on a screen, I have a better idea of how big I should draw these clays because this is some pretty precise clicking. Scaled nicely too!

We have done it, we have given the clays the open pastures they deserve. Now we’ll move on to a cursor for aiming and hitting them.