Hello everyone!
Stefano here with another update!
This week fewer stuff went on the changelog and feature list, but that's only because I dedicated a lot of time to the design and the planning of new objectives to aim at during the development of the project.
Since these weeks I'll be away from my usual working place’s, I'll pause the timelapse’s recording until I'll be back in March.
Updated To-Do list
The development process of a big project for me usually comes up to a three phases loop :
1) Write up a bunch of objectives and features to code until I think I wrote down everything the games needs
2) Code one by one each thing in the list until I come short on the list and I get depressed because I feel lost and without objectives
3) Get back to write objective since now the project is bigger and better than the time I wrote down the previous list and now I have a better vision of the project and its main goals.
So this week I wrote down a lot of things to do and now I feel much better.
The previous development iteration was aiming at having a nice code base and structure to work with crafting, machines, objects, pipes, cables, and stuff like that.
With this iteration I can aim at wrapping all those features up and start working to have a gameplay structure with Level's interactions, time control, areas management, multiple floors level, guys improvements, and an overall better interface and communication with the player.
Level loading with txt
One of the points of the list which I cared the most at the time being was the ability to choose the starting layout of a level with an external .txt file.
This system will help me a lot with testing/debugging but also will be useful to choose starting configuration of different levels inside the game with a easy to use interface.
One of the bigger challenges was to design how to layout the .txt to have a good balance between flexibility, clearness, and easy to use.
After some thoughts about it I came up with this idea:
The first section will store a list of object's UniqueIDs and will link each ID with an increasing power of two number
The second section will be a comma-separated grid of number, where each number represent the sum of the object's number that should be present in that tile
So in this example a tile with a value of 130 will mean that in that tile will be present a floor object (number 2) and a chest object (number 128).
That txt will be then parsed if passed as a parameter to a level constructor and will be understood by the game and will create the level as planned out in the txt.
Minor GUI changes
A smaller, but still important, feature that as been added to the game this week is the presence of the new GUI object "WindowObject_Dropdown". This object seems like a button but on click will create a dropdown list of other buttons.
Keep in touch
If you are curious to see how things will go feel free click any of these links to join our community:
Discord Server: Discord.gg
YouTube channel for Timelapses: Youtube.com
Twitter: Twitter.com
Changelog: Docs.google.com
