In Which I Rebel Against the System

I was supposed to be doing some real work at the office today, but it got cancelled, so I had a productive day adding some cool stuff here instead.  Fight the power.

First of all, I added background image support for areas.  You can add background images in the area editor, and they'll show up when you play the game.  As an example, I updated the first adventure of Hatman (hatman1.pd) with a crappy background for the Hatman's Office area:

I'll update the guide soon to explain the new feature in a little more detail, but it's pretty straightforward.  Images should be 700x345 to display correctly (or else they'll stretch).  If you don't add an image, the background will just be blank.  I'm thinking about adding solid color (or even gradient) backgrounds, but for now it's images only.

Second, I added a little visual element I've been meaning to do for a while: text feeding.  Now, in area descriptions and interactions, the text comes in over time instead of all at once.  I think it adds some visual flair to the application, and draws the eye to the descriptions rather than immediately to the buttons down below.  I plan on having an options screen to control the speed of the text feed, but for now it's just one speed (which is pretty fast).  You can also click the description to make the text load instantly.

Both the Builder and Player are now at v0.1.0, since I figured it was a large enough feature update to bump the secondary version up.  Tertiary versions are primarily going to be bugfixes and small stuff, while secondary updates will be new features and/or larger changes.

Silly Flex

Just updated both Builder and Player to 0.0.3.

There was a really annoying bug in the previous versions which was causing a lot of the lists to get messed up and display incorrectly when scrolling.  Apparently this is because Flex reuses list item renderers when one leaves the screen and another enters.  If you're interested in hearing about how I fixed it you can email me, otherwise, let's just say a koala was eating all my codez.

nom nom nom

Anyway this issue was also causing problems in the Player's interaction history, which should be fixed now, along with the various Builder fixes.  Hooray!

Edit: small bugfix to the Builder.

Engine Update

I've made a small update to both the Player and the Builder to add engine version checking.  This doesn't mean much yet, but it was the first on my to-do list to make further development easier.  Now the engine version that was used to make the game is saved in the .pd file, and when you try to open the game in the Builder or Player it will run a check to make sure the game and the engine are of compatible versions.

Right now all games are going to be compatible, but in the future if I make a fundamental change to the structure of the game files, I'll update the version and any development will have to use the new version to be compatible with new features.

I'll always link to the newest versions on the sidebar, but I'll be keeping the old versions here.

Hatman and the Photographed Fiance

Just wrapped up the first chapter of my demo game. You can download it here. You can use the PPD Player to play it, or the PPD Builder to see how it's put together. It's a pretty simple game, and I'm sure there's some bugs, but it should help give an idea of the type of things you can do with Project PD.

Oh, and I also added a Bugs and Plans page to keep track of what I'm doing.

Demo Game Coming

I'm currently putting together a short (well, I plan on it being short) demo game, which should give a better understanding of what Project PD is about. Not sure when it'll be done, but if I have time to work on this weekend I should finish it by Monday or so.