Originally posted by S.N.N.I've heard mixed things about the screen transition. With the way I've built the game, it's kind of impossible to do a Zelda-like effect at this point since each screen is loaded separately versus being on one giant map. I want to take every effort possible to reduce the load time between regular screens and alter the transition a bit, but having that "scroll" effect won't really work.
The other option is to just have the next area load instantly, which some games do, but I'm not sure if that would be too pleasant-looking.
Is asynchronous loading possible in whatever engine you're using? If so, that would be an option here. Basically, always load (at least) five rooms into memory at once, and whenever you switch rooms, instantly start the loading operations for all four adjacent rooms (or at least those that aren't loaded yet). Since the game's style is very minimalistic, I expect that it should always get done loading all four rooms before the next transition happens (even on slow machines), and if not, you could still put a blocker on a transition that locks the game until the next room is loaded.
Granted, asynchronous loading isn't that easy to implement and the gains are so minimal in this case that it probably isn't even worth it for your game. That's basically what a professionally coded game would do in this case, though, except not on per-room basis, but rather on a per-section basis (like, always loading game sections of X rooms into memory and then also starting to load all adjacent game sections into memory already, while you're playing on the first section).
I'd still change the color, though. As an idea, you could make the color of the transition dependent on the area you're currently in. For example: In a forest area, you'd get a dark green transition, in a plains area, you'd get a light green or light blue (sky color) transition, in a cave, you'd get a brown or black transition etc. I think that could slightly improve the effect.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!