screens, screens and more screens

Well my game is going well and I've spent months now just making supporting non-game screens - there's so many it's driving me nuts. I've blogged about it here:

http://greyaliengames.com/blog/screens-screens-and-more-screens/

which I hope that you may find interesting/useful because I feel that many people don't realise how long all those screens really take...

I ended up writing a sort of html-like script / gui thingy for handling this sort of thing. For a start it's all mesh based and therefore not resolution dependant and it takes a lot of the leg work out of if this area / button is pushed do this, if you roll over this area / button do that. It just gives you a generic solution for all non game screens.

It's got commands like

<item>backgroundmesh="dna.b3d" turn="0,.1,0"</item>

which puts the dna.b3d mesh behind everything and rotates it .1 yaw every loop.

The screen positioning is all done from -1 to 1 in the x and -1 to 1 in the y with justify left / right / centre etc.

Text can be any colour, size or alpha. Then you get colour or image changes on roll overs, and so on.

It gives you a nice frame work which you can build on too as you need to add more features to your title screen.

On top of this I have a raiseevent command that if you click or roll over, if it can't handle it generically it returns back a string of the events raised, which you then capture and do stuff with it.

<item>img="startgame.png" x=-1 y=-1 align="topleft" raiseclickevent="startgame" <rollover>img="startgamealt.png"</rollover></item>

Which will display the startgame.png image in the top left, when you roll over it the image will change to the alt version and when you click it the update function will return "startgame"

Likewise you could have

<item>txt="Start Game" x=-1 y=-1 col="ff0000" align="topleft" raiseclickevent="startgame" <rollover>col="ffffff"</rollover></item>

Sounds pretty smart!

What my framework does is have a TScreen type that handles generic stuff plus I have TMenu and TButton types that handle mouse over, mouse down etc and I code the results based on that. I even have TLabels and TFonts, TListBox, TTextEntry etc so it's a half-decent little GUI.

What's taken me a long time in this game is tracking all the different game stats and making trophies be awarded etc when they hit certain values, and also just the level end game stats - there's tons. Plus unlocking new levels was more complex than a normal game ... You'll see what I mean when BFG release the game, but I can't talk about it much right now...

That's a lot of screens. I yet wonder what the game is about. hope it's not "the screens dungeon" jk.

Grey,

At somepoint it would be cool for you to talk more about how you became the programmer of this project and what it's like working with BFG on this project, etc. ;)

jfk: yay, it's a casual dungeon romp! Uh, only kidding.

JGOware: Sure Iguess I blog about that at some point, I've just gotta finish this game first ;-)

I hate writing optins and title screens, probably why I never finish my games. I think I need to build a basic game framework, then just write the main loop for each game and have pre-defined parameters for options, title, highscore screens.

I have half a dozen unfinished games. The only things missing are the title/options/hi-score/etc screens :( Has to be the most boring part of any project.

you see what I mean. To "finish" a game you gotta really add that stuff. But that's only worth doing if you aim to release it formally on the Internet for free or commercially. It's why I made a framework with all those sort of screens in. Once you got them you can use them again or modify them. Although admittedly the last few games I've worked on have all had very different requirements for those screens sigh ;-)

This first game of mine, I let all this things wait til the end, but I'm not sure that's the way I want it planned this next game. I will in good time look for a great artist to start the communication, sketching, try different things out early.

The actual IN-game was finished halfway through the whole development process which lead to very dull and unexciting work in the end.

Can you show us what the screens look like? It kinda kills the post when you say OMG I have made all these screens and then don't show one. :p

Alas no I can't. I was just really a discussion about OMG screens screens screens.