Blade Edge

Transposed from Gaiiden’s Scroll

Sweet, I finished coding the Settings menu in under an hour tonight, which is really good cause tonight is supposed to be my night out at the gym hangin with the boys and here I am still sitting at my comp. Doh! But I can get outta here now and enjoy the fine nite… well it would be better if it weren’t freakin raining out since the temp is close to 60. But you take what you can get these days.

I tend to keep things rather formalized when I code, and therefore I was pretty much able to directly port over the Settings menu code I used previously in Blitz Blox to Galaxy Conquest with little changes. The only real changes I made were to consolidate the four button functions into just two, as I learned to do with the Mini Conquest menu I worked on into the weee hours of this morning.

Hot tamale! Three days into hardcore development and I’m all done with GC’s menus, database and game framework. Tomorrow I’m going to start playing around with T2D’s tile editor and work out how I’m going to use the tile map functionality of the engine to build game maps. Here’s a rough outline of my development from thereon:

1. Load a game map
2. Save a game map
3. Create in-game map editor
4. Integrate maps into the database so they can be selected from the Mini Conquest menu

I had to think about whether to make the in-game editor first or go for gameplay first. In the end I decided that I would want a variety of maps to develop the gameplay around, and also working on the editor would help flesh out the architecture of the game more in terms of systems and player peices, territory, special systems and all that good stuff. In other words, all this will already then be placeable and functional in the game, so that adding the game play modes will be like filling in the gaps.

But okay that’s all for now, I have to get out of here and enjoy my nite out!! See you tomorrow with more thoughts on the maps…