Monday, January 13, 2014

Back Into the Fray

Today was back into coding land a little bit.

Mostly it has just been cleaning up the way I'm managing the UI for characters.  Since I actually have proper game assets now (yay) I discovered that the way I was handling multiple facial expressions to be a bit lacking.

This also led to some changes to the component system, allowing me to "include" an external text file for individual component definitions.  This was prompted by not wanting to duplicate the layout for the UI into every level file.

So, between those things, and the inevitable bugs from taking everything apart and putting it back together again, the day is pretty much done.

I have also clearly not been practicing the guitar enough.  I seem to practice in one or two week stretches and get back to the point where my hand doesn't feel like it's going to fall off after playing power chords for 20 minutes... and then promptly take a month off from playing and go back to square one again.

Back to it then...

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

The Blog That Time Forgot

My last post was Dec. 19?

Christmas season is obviously not my most productive time of year.  That's not to say I haven't been working (although there was a lot of World of Warcraft going on), but the hours have been kind of weird.

Since the last update, I have mostly been doing stuff that doesn't blog well.  Some UI stuff, editor stuff, story stuff, and level stuff.  Blogging about those would be boring, boring, spoilers, and boring spoilers, respectively.

Or maybe you're really into greyblocked spaceship placement.  This is for you guys:



Probably the most interesting thing was the addition of free-flight mode.  Up to this point, the levels have essentially been built on a rail - the user can move around inside the camera's view, but the camera is on a fixed animation path.  I had been planning on doing this for ages but was too focused on other things to get around to it.

So far it feels really good.  I'm still trying to figure out the camera angle.  It feels really good to have the camera down low, but then it's way too obvious that the whole world is built on a 2D plane.  If you pull the camera up, you can't see far enough ahead of the ship.  I'm sure I'll work something out.

Next up is a bit more enemy AI, and probably a little more level editor UI stuff.  I did manage to get parts of the UI back from the Profound State of Brokenness that I somehow put it into a couple months ago.  Even Perforce history couldn't rescue me from that one.  There were way too many "Why doesn't this work?  How did this used to work?  HOW DID THIS EVER WORK????" moments.