Back to the drawing board (in a good way)

I'm happy with the first scene so far. The artwork looks decent (for an unspecified value of decent), and things do what they're supposed to do.

So far, that isn't much. The gardener needs to get into his shed, but doesn't have his keys.

He needs to take the ladder, put it against the apple tree, and climb it to get the keys from a bird box. It's not an especially difficult puzzle.

Figuring out how to get him to climb the ladder took the better part of a day on its own. (eventual solution: create a horizontal pixel-wide gap in the walkable area, walk to top edge of lower area, move character across the gap, create the illusion of walking up the ladder using baseline to keep it between the character and the tree, then do it backwards).

Once he has the key, he can enter the shed. The interior currently looks like this:

Which is a bit pants.

I'm going to spend the next few days drawing the inside of an allotment shed, along with the typical stuff you'd fiind in there - gas bottles, cups, tools, string, pots, and so on. You'd never seen a hoarder until you've met an allotment gardener. Nothing goes to waste. On the other hand, I don't want the playable area to be too cluttered.

I've also reskinned the GUI, givng the game an appropriate hand-drawn inventory and themeatically appropriate volume and speed sliders:

The buttons have mouseover images, and each of those buttons leads to sub menus that also have buttons. It took an absolute age to do.

I am actually really pleased with the inventory and various buttons. Again, they have mouseover images, and the spray bottles are left and right controls to go through the inventory.