Game Development So Far
So after finally getting my laptop back in use (it was backing up the whole Gym Empire project and decided to take way longer than it needed to, only to then tell me it had failed. So long story short I zipped it up and used pCloud instead of Dropbox) I was able to crack on with some of this week’s tasks:
- Finish off graph implementation – after downloading and installing Vectrosity I jumped into making some lines to represent the graphs in the game. On first impressions it seemed really easy. I was making lines and were pretty decent. The problem came when I went to incorporate them into the UI object structure. Basically I use a single canvas on which I draw all the UI. To easily manipulate the graphs I need to have them as part of that structure representing where within the UI they appear. The problem was as soon as I moved the line objects to where they needed to be, they went crazy! For some reason the point coordinate would jump down by 1000 pixels and then continue to move indefinitely. Any attempt to relocate them would be “pointless” and they would disappear instantly. Upon investigating it turns out that because I am using a scaling function for the canvas (to ensure the whole screen scales nicely for any resolution changes) this wreaked havoc with the point on the line. I need to use the scaling function for everything to look right so I needed to find a workaround. In the end I decided to control it through the code. Instead of just placing a point once and then not updating it unless it changes I decided to set the point location on every frame, this means that the game loop is constantly “holding” the point in place and not letting it slip by thousands of pixels. I’m quite happy with this fix as it works perfectly now and it doesn’t add any strain to the game loop as the function to do it is pretty light weight.
- Refine button design – with the lost time waiting for backups and a bit of extra time taken other UI updates I didn’t get round to doing any button redesign.
- Populate all the menu panels of the UI – well if ever there was an over simplified task description it’s this one! I’ll start by saying there is going to be a LOT of effort needed to fully populate all the menu panels and it will probably be some time before I am fully happy with them. However I have at least started. My initial mock-up was to get down on paper what information I thought needed to be together and where. After doing that I started putting the first pass of information into the panels. At this point there is no data plugged in behind the scenes, it’s just creating the right layout visually. As I started putting graphs in places it just didn’t look or feel anywhere near close to what my final vision is. Individually there are a lot of little things to do e.g. finish graph design, populate axis, decide on how to portray certain data, ensure colours aid in visibility, refine graph sizes, implement sliders etc. Each one of those little things adds up to quite a bit of work! By the end of the week I managed to get things into a place where I have an indication of some basic layout, focusing mainly on graphs. I also have the graph control set up in the background i.e. the template code is now done ready to be specialised for each instance of use.
Other Developments
After completing the front end GUI and there being a decent amount of visual change I decided to write a new IndieDB article describing the changes.
I did my usual thing of posting it to social media and got a nice amount of traffic. The funny part is some of the comments I got. In the article I described using Theme Hospital, The Sims and other classic retro tycoon games as inspiration for their functional UI design. The first comment I got on reddit was along the lines of “This just looks like it’s from 1995”. Hmmm, well is that a compliment or a diss? I assumed it was the latter but I found it quite funny as it kind of confirms that I achieved what I was aiming for, lol. Don’t get me wrong even the slightest hint of criticism always feels like a killer blow, I never realised how hard it could be to take, but I’m getting better at it and so far any criticism has really helped in one way or another so I certainly don’t want to shy away from it! To lighten the blow I had some nice responses direct and indirect with regards to the comment. Also the peeps on the Discord server reiterated that it is exactly that retro feel they’re after, so all is good in the hood :D.
Time Management
So there’s been a lot of UI work over the past weeks and with the populating of the panel data looking to take at least another two weeks to get close to what my vision is, I’ve decided to take a little break this week and focus on something else. So this weeks tasks are:
- Implement ragdoll physics for clients “failing” on equipment
- Add more equipment types
- Make clients wander around
Gym Empire is now available to add to your Steam Wishlist.
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