Playground Panic #6 – More aesthetic stuff

So this week I haven’t worked on any “major” artifacts, but instead a whole bunch of minor things and bug-fixes. This unfortunately means that it gets harder and harder to make these blog-posts :/
Oh well, continuing on with the aesthetic things I talked about last week, here’s a little on how we show that a level (or day as we call it) is completed.

In our game, we have normal kids and “special” kids that you need to hurry and get clean before their parents show up and complain (the other kids could be orphans, but let’s say that they are just staying a little longer). This is showcased initially using two different things on the screen: Arrows pointing in the direction of the special kids and circles at the bottom of the screen that moves on a bar. These are linked using the same randomized color, giving the feeling that they are connected. When the circles are getting close to the right of the bar, they trigger a warning message for incoming parents and if you see this, you’re in for a stressful seek for the child of said parents. When all the special kids are cleaned, you are no longer in a rush and the day is cleared.

Early version of the user interface

To make it easier to see when a day is cleared, a sprite pops up saying just that. Here’s a quick rundown on how that works:

1. A timer and an integer (int32 in this case) is created to check for how long the message should be displayed until the loading screen for the next day (about to be the upgrade-screen) starts. The displayed image is loaded in with a transparent color so it can’t be seen.

2. When a kid is fully cleaned, check if there are any more dirty specials running around. If not, set the color of the “day cleared”-image back to white (alpha works as well) and restart the timer.

3. Start updating the position of the image (unless you already are doing that, now’s a good time to start).

4. Check if the clock have ticked for long enough (aka. is a larger integer than the one we set before, using the same principle as when doing attack-speeds) and go to the next level if such is the case.

That’s about it for that. Once again another artifact with a lot of small checks here and there. Now back to being sick.