Wednesday, March 28, 2012

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment