okay two-week projects
i was planning on doing map generation stuff, but before i did that i wanted to get some infrastructure stuff working. previously, the game started and gave a new game / quit menu, and new game would generate a landscape and drop you into that and then hitting escape would immediately close the game. i kind of wanted some way to render the world graph, and i wanted to get more of an interface loop going on, and working on those things took up basically the entire two weeks. the interface i have now is a lot closer to that of an actual game's, though: from the 'title screen', the new game option loads up a setting form for how to generate the worldmap graph, and then it generates a (stub, debug-rendered) worldmap that you can move around and look at, and when you select a tile you can zone into the actual world on that chunk. there are system menus accessible by hitting escape in either of those two modes, and you can do things like reset the worldmap or generate a new one, or quit back to the title screen. so fairly minimal things, ultimately, but way more of a UI than any of my games have really had before.
going forward i'm hoping this two-week stretch is gonna have me rendering a world map in a fancier way and then maybe trying to get it to look more exciting. i have some ideas for what i want a prettier world-map render to look like, and ideas for how i want my world graph expansions to work, but it's hard to say what any of that will look like until i have a demo working.
i was planning on doing map generation stuff, but before i did that i wanted to get some infrastructure stuff working. previously, the game started and gave a new game / quit menu, and new game would generate a landscape and drop you into that and then hitting escape would immediately close the game. i kind of wanted some way to render the world graph, and i wanted to get more of an interface loop going on, and working on those things took up basically the entire two weeks. the interface i have now is a lot closer to that of an actual game's, though: from the 'title screen', the new game option loads up a setting form for how to generate the worldmap graph, and then it generates a (stub, debug-rendered) worldmap that you can move around and look at, and when you select a tile you can zone into the actual world on that chunk. there are system menus accessible by hitting escape in either of those two modes, and you can do things like reset the worldmap or generate a new one, or quit back to the title screen. so fairly minimal things, ultimately, but way more of a UI than any of my games have really had before.
going forward i'm hoping this two-week stretch is gonna have me rendering a world map in a fancier way and then maybe trying to get it to look more exciting. i have some ideas for what i want a prettier world-map render to look like, and ideas for how i want my world graph expansions to work, but it's hard to say what any of that will look like until i have a demo working.
