EPTPart Two - Technical Foundation
Part Three - Game Design
Part Four - Input and Physics
Part Five - More Physics Things
Part Six - Even More Physics
This Week
Hello again TeamLiquid!
Welcome back to my blog about the development of The Adventures of Sam the Pirate, the 2D platformer I'm creating as the final game project for my Bachelor of Software Engineering degree. Hope you all had a great Christmas and New Years, I spent far too much time playing Hearthstone, a bit of Civ5, and spending time with my family to do any work. I have managed to get a bit of work done on some user interface related things over this past week, and have a new piece of concept art to show off today as well. I had some thoughts over the holidays on fixing the remaining physics issues, but have not got around to implementing any of them yet.
User Interface
Most of the work done on the user interface so far has been pretty basic low level stuff, setting up for the more interesting stuff later. At the moment, an interface layout will be stored in a file, and be loaded when needed. When the player forces the displayed interface to change, through starting a game from the main menu for example, the displayed interface will simply be switched. In the case of opening a menu while in a level with the level interface displayed, I'll be able to directly force an separate interface to be displayed over the top of that. So basically I'll have interface layouts stored in different files, and be able to display multiple layouts at once.
As well as creating the basics mentioned above, I've created a generic button class, with normal, hover, and click states. Creating this generic class has given me a little bit of a problem however. If I want to create multiple buttons that each take different actions, I'll have to create extra class, each inheriting from the generic button class. While this would work, I don't really want to do it as it is inefficient, and I want the user interface system to be fairly generic, so I can more easily reuse it in future projects. As I've used Lua scripting on my debug console, allowing me to add commands without changing code, I'm considering doing something similar here. As the interface layouts are stored in files, I could also store the name of a Lua file, and function within that file for each button, allowing me to ensure that each button has unique functionality without creating tons of different classes. Still thinking about how best to implement this however, so we'll see how it goes.
The user interface system in general will also need to scale based on display resolution. I have a target resolution of 1920x1080 (art will be created with this resolution in mind), but it's unrealistic to assume that everyone uses that resolution. It should be relatively easy to compare the resolution the game is running in, with the target resolution, and make adjustments based on that.
New Concept Art
![[image loading]](http://swashbucklinstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/docks1-1024x460.png)
What's next?
Officially back to class next week, where we'll also be getting a new capstone assignment. We finished a research based capstone before Christmas, and this new capstone will be development focused. With any luck, I'll be able to use the capstone to create a level editor, which I was planning to do already! I have a feeling the tutors might want me to do a bit more though, so I'm also considering turning it into more of a general engine editor. So as well as creating levels, it'd be able to create interface layouts, preview sprites in the game engine, etc. It would certainly make things easier, as currently levels and interface layouts are created by hand in text files!
So until Monday, and I know what I'm doing on the capstone, I won't know 100% what I'll be working on next. Likely I'll be continuing with the user interface stuff, planning out the level editor, and continuing to adjust/fix the physics.
Keep up to date!
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