It might not be necessary, but I think the land portions of the map could be a little greener, because if you look at a weird map the wrong way, you can think the water's the land. Not really a big deal, but just worth considering. If you're going to have it, the pulse on the player icon should appear more often.
Not sure if I follow on the greenness, but I'll look into it, and make the marker pulse more often.
I kind of like that there's no need for finding a block merchant or anything to make blocks - they just cost money. I'm not sure what your idea for that is, though.
I have to play around with that, but for now the plan is that there'll be two ways to build; the resource gathering way like Minecraft or Terraria, or the commission way. One of the things in games like Minecraft and Terraria that bothers me is that there is a pretty low ceiling for building efficiency, because no matter if you have all the best gear and automated harvesting in the game, you still gotta go out and mine resources and it never gets significantly faster after a point.
So for those who are unimpressed with resource gathering to begin with, or end game players, you'll be able to just throw gold at the matter. It's probably going to be abstracted out, but I figure it's like commissioning NPC builders to come build stuff for you.
I think the blocks should turn transparent, with a black square under them if you don't want to draw the terrain, rather than not having them turn transparent at all. It would be nice if you could do a 'cut-away', like The Sims does. It would just require a cut-away version of the sprite (cut in half, for example).
I just realized a way I could fade the blocks down to the terrain that should be efficient enough. The reason why I can't make blocks themselves transparent is that there is no way that wouldn't mess with fullscreen postprocessing effects like SSAO or outlines. After all, you can't blend opacity or normals together.
I was impressed at the quality of your water shader - it's pretty cool.
I think that the characters don't really feel like they're 'on' the slopes - I think scaling them by the distance away from the camera might help. Although, then it wouldn't really be 2.5D, so I'm not sure.
Dirt would be good to break up the monotony between the rocks and the grass.
EDIT: Anyway, the game's looking pretty good so far. Nice job!
Thanks, I'm pretty happy with the water myself. :D
I think partly to blame is the stock sprite I'm using, though I'm thinking of doing a blur effect depending on depth relative to the player later, so maybe that'll work out. Scaling would be a nightmare, so that's out. I'll have to have my own art in for the player sprite before I'm gonna try and fix the floaty feeling.
And more variety in terrain than just "water, grass, rocks" is definitely in the planning. Eventually it'll be tile by tile with proper transitions.
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