The Green Warden – Report 2

By: Marcus van Aller / February 19, 2015 /

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Commented out as it still crashes the game

Above is an example of how the main menu would look like.
Artist: Eva Sokolova

This week after a meeting with Finn, I started work on the main menu of the game as my knowledge of programming is inferior to that of the other programmer and the main menu contains many of the same elements that the actual game contains and thus I can train on programming while assisting the development of the game instead of risking to hinder it by my slow pace.
I have to a large degree made the main menu from the game state and then removing the clearly non-essential parts such as enemy and player to make the code cleaner without waste code.
This method will also allow me to have a head start in the development of the main menu instead of having to start from scratch. It will after all already take a lot of time just for me to learn more about coding and thus any extra work will just be unnecessary allocated time that would be better spent learning than building something we already have a foundation for.

The biggest challenge I have met so far has been to successfully adapt the code from the game state to fit the menu state, I also foresee that the animation of the buttons and the Finite State Machine in the main menu can become problems.

As of right now, I am working on making sure that the adapted code does not make the game crash or make the compiler refuse to compile for obvious reasons. Once I have achieved that I will work on making a background show up and preferably change dynamically based on the size of the game window. After that I will start to work on creating the buttons without animations and adding music after which I will start with the animations. I will do the animations last as they are the least important, before that everything is of the utmost importance to have completed in the main menu as soon as possible. The sound and the background are very important as they shape the first impressions a player get of the game, however, the things that have a large impact on functionality such as being able to click the buttons take priority. I see making a background as being relatively easy as well which is why it will come in early in the process.

The main problems are time and skill, the latter of which this work on the main menu is meant to help with.

Filed under: Game Development – introduction – 5SD033 Tagged: 5SD033