So my previously announced “Art Week” on Captain Stretchy-Arms has begun. I got off to a bit of a “messy” start – later than I was planning, and my first day somehow managed to spread itself over three actual days. I’m just going to call this “Day 2” and be done with it.

Let me show you what I’ve done so far:

I’ve added some textures to the blocks, based on Danc’s (Lost Garden) Circle Textures set. And I’m not entirely happy with how it’s turned out – so I’m going to replace them at some point. They don’t really match the “cartoon” theme that I want Captain Stretchy-Arms to have.

(I was hoping they’d be “classy comic book” at a stretch – but it doesn’t really work.)

The other piece of new art that you can see – the clouds – does match the cartoon theme. However they are just a mock-up in the above screenshot. I have a procedural cloud generator working, but I still need to add parallax scrolling and make the clouds “endless” (like the world itself).

That doesn’t seem like much art to have done in two days, does it?

Well – I just can’t seem to tear myself away from programming. I’ve been fiddling with some msbuild stuff; and I’ve fixed up some issues with and started using Louis Ingenthron’s GIMP .xcf importer for the XNA content pipeline, so now I don’t have to keep wrestling with The GIMP’s very tedious PNG exporting.

And I’ve made some more improvements to the AI. Now if you get stuck at the bottom of the map, the AI will very quickly kill you – rather than letting the player linger in an inescapable state for too long.

I was debating whether to put up a download for this, seeing as the clouds aren’t actually ready yet, and the tiles are going to be removed. But seeing as this is the only chance you’ll get to see those tiles in action, and there are some gameplay modifications I’ve gone ahead and put one up. Download it here.