Blog-post 2 Customization! …kind of

I finished the buttons last week so now I could finally start to build the customization-state. So, this time I’m going to write a little bit about that.

 I’ll take a quick moment to explain how we decided make the buttons. Last time I said that I hadn’t decided if we were going to let the buttons do what they should do in their own update method, or if we would make a for loop that checks every button when one is pressed and look for the one with the right type which we have defined in a parameter.

This Monday I started to sketch on the layout for the customization-state, I ended up with two, one that I made as I wanted it and one that was made after a suggestion from out lead designer. I preferred my design because I wanted the upgrade buttons on the same level, and I wanted them to be symmetric. The downside with my design is that the suit doesn’t get as much attention as I would have liked, but I couldn’t find a workaround with the space I was given. Because weapons will probably change the game more than the suit I think it will be just fine with the weapon in the center. I did like that the suit was the obvious target for your attention in the other one but all in all It looked way too inconsistent. We ended up voting inside the group and my design won. So I started working on creating a more refined mockup that I could take parts out of and use as placeholders.

Here are the designs:

(Left: My layout, Right: Lead Designers layout, the face was supposed to be some decal or something…)

And from here on it was mostly adding buttons and sprites to the empty state. The state works just fine, but the buttons doesn’t change anything in the game-state yet, I have however made them change the placeholder-sprite when you press the “next” and “previous” buttons.

I also added a pop-up-box that is displayed when the trinket-box is pressed. When the pop-up-box is being drawn all of the buttons in the background is disabled and you can only interact with the buttons that is displayed in the pop-up and if you click anywhere outside the box it disappears.

I will soon start to work on a drag-and –drop way to apply trinkets, these trinkets will mostly be side-grades or maybe some more interesting stuff that change the game a bit like adding a charge-beam for example)

The layout for the customization-screen is now finished and here is the result:

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Uppsala University Universitet Campus Gotland Group 9 Laban Melander Boreal Entertainment Game Programming 5SD03323