Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Woah, is it really 4am already?? Yeesh where did the time go? Tonight I downloaded the new Alpha release of T2D v1.1 as well as the CodeWeaver development environment and got crackin. In case you missed it, I started working again on Galaxy Conquest a month or so ago, but stopped shortly thereafter in anticipation of this new T2D release. Well, now it’s finally here and so I’m back at the development once more. Tonight I finished up the GUI skeleton. I have all the menus/controls laid out and you can navigate through them all, even though none of the other buttons do anything yet. But everything’s placed, named and spec’d out so I can start writing in the functionality tomorrow. My next step also is to create the game database using the TorqueDB resource. I use this database to store all the menu options as well as the saved game data. Once that’s set up I can use it to display the menu options in the game.

So that’s it. The game’s essential GUI menus/controls are all set, and it took me 5 hours. Oh well that’s right – I had to convert a lot of the original artwork into T2D’s button format. See with my old engine I had buttons in a template image, whereas T2D has a seperate image file for each button state. So I had to use Photoshop to take each button template (about 10 over the course of the night) and break it into four seperate files. Rather tedious, yes, but I got into a routine that made it go by faster after the first two or three. Still, this GUI stuff is pretty heavy; I can see having a dedicated programmer (at least in the initial development phase) for GUI programming. *phew*

Okay, I better get some sleep seeing as that I’m going to be receiving a wake up call in…. wheee 5 hours Sweeeeet, feels good to be developing into the weeee hours of the morning once again. But before I leave here are some more screen shots. If you checked the previous entry I linked to earlier you’ll notice I fixed the alpha in the quit button PNG. yey.

k nite!