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posts dated from: november 2015
Dev Log: Prototyping Battles
Still working on this prototype for some kind of RPGish battle game. I've been reworking some parts of the little UI framework I whipped up for it, and also changing some stuff around and probably breaking stuff in Otter as I come up with new ideas of what I need out of the engine.
Right now it's super basic and I'm hoping to have a playable battle pretty soon. I've been making a lot of use of YAML for crafting the data for all the different pieces of the battle.
I'm pretty excited about the potential of this idea but I'm totally not sure if it's just going to be really dumb, so I guess that's why I'm taking the time to prototype it. I don't want to go into too many specifics of what it's going to be since I find that talking too much about my ideas kinda erodes my motivation sometimes, and also I don't know enough about what the idea is yet...
So I've been working on this prototype some, and the rest of my time is still being spent on the logistics of changing states and addresses which is for some reason a giant pain in the butt. If I ever make a boatload of money my first employee will be someone to just take care of life crap for me while I just work on games all the time.
Right now it's super basic and I'm hoping to have a playable battle pretty soon. I've been making a lot of use of YAML for crafting the data for all the different pieces of the battle.
I'm pretty excited about the potential of this idea but I'm totally not sure if it's just going to be really dumb, so I guess that's why I'm taking the time to prototype it. I don't want to go into too many specifics of what it's going to be since I find that talking too much about my ideas kinda erodes my motivation sometimes, and also I don't know enough about what the idea is yet...
So I've been working on this prototype some, and the rest of my time is still being spent on the logistics of changing states and addresses which is for some reason a giant pain in the butt. If I ever make a boatload of money my first employee will be someone to just take care of life crap for me while I just work on games all the time.
Otter Example: Tweening
Did you know that Otter supports tweening? Now you do! Tweening is one of the coolest things in the world in my opinion and it's one of the easiest ways to create sweet effects and animations in games.
(I don't know what's up with the end of this gif so whatever.)
Otter makes use of the Glide tweening library by Jacob Albano. It has a similar syntax to TweenLite from the AS3 days of using FlashPunk, and since Otter is based off of FlashPunk having a syntax similar to a flash tweening library makes a lot of sense to me.
Check out the full source code of this example on the Otter example page!
(I don't know what's up with the end of this gif so whatever.)
Otter makes use of the Glide tweening library by Jacob Albano. It has a similar syntax to TweenLite from the AS3 days of using FlashPunk, and since Otter is based off of FlashPunk having a syntax similar to a flash tweening library makes a lot of sense to me.
Check out the full source code of this example on the Otter example page!
Dev Log: GUI Stuff
I've been making some good progress on my latest prototype over the past few days. I got a quick GUI system working in the game but then quickly realized that my approach was pretty bad. After reading up on some articles written about making simple lightweight GUI stuff for video games I scrapped almost all the code and rewrote it.
My first approach was just having each GUI Entity operate independently and that worked for a bunch of simple cases such as a single drag and drop item, or a button that does something when it's pressed. However doing things beyond that, such as multiselect, and having different GUI elements pass info along to one another, requires a different approach.
The approach I settled on for now is something I've done briefly before with a quick prototype a few months ago. I'm now electing to use a single "controller" class as the base of the GUI system. The controller has a list of all the GUI elements it's in charge of, and almost all of the logic for the system is handled inside the controller.
A controller has a list of child elements that it controls, and each element can also have even more child elements added to it. The controller is the only element that receives input from the game, and anything resulting from that input is passed along to the appropriate element on the list of children.
I still have a little ways to go on a few things. I want to be able to get modal elements working so that I can do things like message boxes that have to be cleared before continuing and interruptions when important things happen. There are still a few bugs to sort out with clicking through elements and dragging stuff around, but so far I feel like my progress has been pretty great and I might have something playable way sooner than I thought!
My first approach was just having each GUI Entity operate independently and that worked for a bunch of simple cases such as a single drag and drop item, or a button that does something when it's pressed. However doing things beyond that, such as multiselect, and having different GUI elements pass info along to one another, requires a different approach.
The approach I settled on for now is something I've done briefly before with a quick prototype a few months ago. I'm now electing to use a single "controller" class as the base of the GUI system. The controller has a list of all the GUI elements it's in charge of, and almost all of the logic for the system is handled inside the controller.
A controller has a list of child elements that it controls, and each element can also have even more child elements added to it. The controller is the only element that receives input from the game, and anything resulting from that input is passed along to the appropriate element on the list of children.
I still have a little ways to go on a few things. I want to be able to get modal elements working so that I can do things like message boxes that have to be cleared before continuing and interruptions when important things happen. There are still a few bugs to sort out with clicking through elements and dragging stuff around, but so far I feel like my progress has been pretty great and I might have something playable way sooner than I thought!
