Written By ·Latency
Bounty Bros. #6: WIP Features
Several big changes are a work-in-progress but on the cusp of completion. See the details.
UI is hard. It’s been a recurring challenge in our game dev experience and I think it’s one of the pieces that have taken the longest with our games so far. With Striker Ball, the team select menu was one of the hardest things. It was uniquely difficult having to support joining four controllers or a keyboard that could all choose to control both players on a team, or play with a CPU and still leave room for another player, all while keeping to one screen so players don't have to specify how they want to play in multiple steps. Keeping the selection to one screen was an ambitious decision as it turns out. Coming up with how to structure and fit all the necessary pieces of an interface together properly and clearly is full of challenges even with simpler interfaces.
Working on a generic controller mapper UI has been no exception. I'm aiming for some slightly more advanced features to support more controllers kinds that has taken some extra time, so I decided to take a break from it for a small time this month to add another essential feature to our map editor.
As of now, our map editor only allows the placing of collision tiles and texture atlas tiles. Next, I'm adding arbitrary map "elements" to the editor. In our case the elements will be things like snakes, snake spawners, pots, and our main characters. As a bonus, when I'm done, map elements will also be script-able and hot-reloaded into the editor.
Along with these features I still have some engine changes I wanted to finish as well. So, there is several work-in-progress updates, all of which I hope to finish before the end of July. But until then… Happy Independence Day America!
Written by, Latency: Lead Game Programmer at K-tech Studio