So today, I’ve got a long list of cleanup items I’m doing. Then tomorrow I’m going to create a bunch of levels. Then on Monday I’ll package it up for the IGF. Madness ensues.

So far I’ve been working on reducing the memory footprint of the game. Now the whole game takes 2MB of data, and a single level takes < 64k of data. It's good to keep things trim! I'm also fixing a bunch of mundane bugs / minor issues. In the meantime I've created a main menu. So, yeah, there's a reason that I'm going to be rounding up an artist pretty soon 🙂 This is not "teh awesome"!

Okay, my big goal is to get the Build section working. The user has to be able to create new levels and edit their old levels. My brain is melting a bit, but I think I can manage to get this done today. I’m going to be using sqlite3 as the storage system for the levels.

A lesson was learned today in KISS. I was having all kinds of confusion in my brains about how to handle some state transitions. Then a pal of mine (Mike Kasprzak) said: “I have a 1 level state stack” .. as opposed to some kind of complex stack system or whatever. He ended with these wise words:

<PoV> yeah, it’s all you really need
<PoV> each menu option can go where it wants to go, but parent lets you remember 1 level deep, like whether to return to a pause menu or such.
<PoV> anything more than that is probably too complicated for the user too

That’s the truth. Anyway, thanks to that piece of advice, I was able to get to my goal for the day! I’ve got my level editor integrated into a level-preview list whereby I can manage a number of levels (and thus, create a game that has more than one!) Here it is.

Anyway. Tomorrow I’m going to be spending some serious time churning out levels!

-Phil

This entry was posted on Friday, October 15th, 2010 at 9:34 pm and is filed under dynamite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.