This month is exciting! Let's start with the good stuff! First, our hero Doug now has an animated hat and pistol. Not only that, he is now able to shoot and talk with the addition of a dialog system in the Bones game engine. Here's a glimpse of the functionality so you can see it right now.

Dialog

With some effort I successfully converted bevy_retrograde_ui to work for Bones. bevy_retrograde_ui was a layer that was previously built for the Bevy Game Engine to add some features and fix a problem where pixel fonts blurred. Now it works for Bones and our dialog text is nice and crisp!

I also got the dialog text, animations, and typing speed hot-reloading from YAML files that look like this on the inside:

- !Speed 8.0
- !Shake { magnitude: 0.6, speed: 2.0 }
- !Text "Yawwwwn."
- !Break []

- !Speed 25.0
- !Text "Welp."
- !Speed 3
- !Text " "
- !Speed 25.0
- !Text "Guess I should get some target practice in before the big release."
- !Break []

I only use one in the example but there is several animations from the old bevy_retrograde_ui that I was able to implement into the new structure including waving, italics, and stamping all of which can be combined with each other and added onto in the future.

I also want to add a Pause variant later that will be a shortcut for doing pauses in the dialog instead of having to put a low speed space section in the file.

Animation

To make Doug's animation a little more fluent I added my own animation system that allowed reversing the animations so that while the character is still walking he shuffles back and forth through the animation instead of restarting or sliding backwards. Technically, his walking is only one frame away from being indistinguishable forwards and backwards but the difference is there! 😅

Outlook

Building out the early features in Bounty Bros has already allowed me to start reusing code from Striker Ball and has given me the opportunity to begin nailing down exactly how I want to organize the different pieces of a game. This is exciting because I feel like I can see how easy it's going to be to just start making a game once these things are nailed down. We'll be able to easily put everything in its place right away and start working on what is specific to each game we develop without having to re-create general systems.

Next month I'm expecting to start work on loading tiled maps. I also want to start work on one of the most anticipated parts of the project which is attempting an editor that will allow us to build our maps with live editing. Live editing means we will be able to design our maps while we play them. We're hoping that we can make the editor but for the time being we're feeling it out to see if it is practical to create for this project. If all goes well, live editing could be immensely useful for our development.

So far we're happy with our strategy and progress and I can't wait for next month!

Written by, Latency: Lead Game Programmer at K-tech Studio