Blog 6: Menus

4/4/2023

Welcome back to the Integration Hell development blog.

I started this week doing every programmers favorite activity, refactoring code. My original code for the game's renderer was basically hard coded to work with the main() function. I didn't want to blow up main with that code so I had to move it to its own file. This also allowed me to add additional support for things that will make rendering more than the two testing textures easy. This leads me to the next thing I want to talk about.

Adding tiles/items - I want to have as little overhead in adding things to the game later so that adding an item to the game does not require engine modification. The way I want to accomplish this is through making asset directories. In the directory will be the texture and properties of that item/tile in its own folder (such as a grass tile in a directory labeled 'grass'). I haven't created an implementation for this yet but this is where I plan to go with it when I start.

Menus - I started work on the menus for IH. This is so when you start the game, go to settings, click on a tile, etc. a menu will pop up with information. For now, all the menus do is display sample text. Some things I want to add to the menu system are widgets like sliders, text input boxes, or buttons. I would also like them to be draggable with the mouse. Below is what I have for the menus so far. (The close box in the corner has not been implemented yet)

That is all I have for this week. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you next week!

The Checklist:

Tasks:

𐄂 Create more assets to use

𐄂 Create better file organization for the game

✔️ Create a menu system

𐄂 Create widgets for the menus

𐄂 Create animations

𐄂 Give the game an icon