Another Week has gone by and this one was faster than usual (or is it just me?). Here's the update for this week.
A big problem for me while making any game is the Menu system. One of the biggest aims of the technology that we develop is to have zero scripting required to make a game. Menus are different for each game. Hence it needs to be customizable and that generally means at least a little scripting involved. Our Menu system until last week was very difficult to script in order to do what is required. Also there were some design issues in the classes. So i started this week determined to make the menu system absolutely sleek in code while maintaining the generic nature required to do any game. So at the end of the week i have managed to achieve this goal by using several generic variables and lists that would store the game initialization information. However on the down side the menu is now even more difficult for an artist to script. Solution: Tool. For the next game, when it is time to start working on the menus, i plan on making a tool that can be used to load up all the different resources, drag and drop them on the screen and assign behaviors from there and save the scripts.
Currently we have a fairly decent menu system capable of handle most requirements. Some of its features are:-
3D viewports - capable of loading and displaying several game objects like players, characters and levels.
Graphics - images that user cannot interact with, these also have several behaviors that can be attached like cycling a directory of images etc.
Buttons - User interact able images that can do quite a lot like take you to a different menu, open a new messagebox, start a game etc. They can have keys associated with them. They have 2D particles that can be enabled. They also have several actions on events such as rollovers.
Sliders - used for setting any real variables in the game such as volume or brightness or gamma.
Each page can have sounds and button change can also have a different sound.
Most of these behaviors were already coded for during development of "Drag Impact" some of the features are brand new. Anyway completed "Tank Battle" Menu. Posting some screen shots below. Please do let us know what you think. Some of the images need minor changes which get done this week.
The others in the meanwhile have been trying to populate the levels more and polish it up with billboards and trees and water. However it has been sort of a slow week with the festival taking a few good working days and a very badly times UPS failure. I hope to have a lot of eye candy next week with good looking particles and levels. So if you are reading this you dont want to miss that :)
On a side note Mid Day Bangalore edition did a story on us. Here is the link Mid Day story
