Today I started with the game setup screen. The player can choose here one of the available scenarios, and later the game level if one player mode is previously selected. I had no idea how to organize this screen; after all, I’m not a UX designer. I think the end result I came up with looks very nice, and all text colors fit perfectly together.

For each scenario I wanted to show full description, victory conditions and also some other parameters like max. number of players (for now only two players are supported) and max. number of turns. The player can see also the whole map. All these informations are available in the original game only in the game manual, and the players couldn’t see the maps in advance.

For the next part, which is the game setup screen, I want to add some animated ASCII images – something like GIF images converted to ASCII. I was already surprised with poor performance on 4.x devices, when it comes to frequently refreshing text views, so I wanted to test the performance again (this time with smaller amount of characters).

I converted the unit graphics from the Assassins scenario from the Commodore 64 version of the game; somehow that in game graphics looked always better and clearer to me as in the Amiga version. The units turned up great and soon I got the unit spinning and dancing on the screen. I’ll show it when the player needs to equip his units.

Today I decided to give it a one more shot with the backgrounds for the title screen. I used different ASCII converters, different converter configurations, different font sizes, different styles, and still I’m not happy with the results.

On the other hand I can’t say that I completely wasted my precious free time for today; I got some ideas how I can make this work, but first I need a rest from the title screen next couple of days.

I was thinking about this screen as soon as I decided to start coding the game actually from the beginning. It’s still not crystal clear how this screen will look like. What I first had in mind was to show a nice background from the Amiga version of the game, converted to ASCII. I’ve done some conversions but I’m not satisfied with the end result. The problem is also stretching the 4:3 image to widescreen format. I don’t like at all that I’m leaving this part unfinished, but I have to move on, and leave the background for later.

To not leave the screen completely empty, I added the title of the game at the top, drawn with ASCII fonts. Since the text is much bigger than the actual screen, I added some horizontal scrolling and fading effects on both sides.

Now the screen looks much more alive.

Next to do is the title screen, but before that I wanted to make a new menu controller. The idea was that it should be easy to configure, that it can be initialized with only one method call and that it should take care of drawing, focusing and selecting the elements. All the elements and actions are represented with nice transition effects. For now the control supports only one type of element which opens a new menu tree on click. I’ll expand the functionalities later on demand.

Now the intro screen is also finished, showing a nice ASCII logo with some fade in/out effects. For the logo I wanted to add also some ASCII transformation effects, but the problem was the performance. Something has changed on Android 4.x, and the TextView can’t handle refreshing itself with approx. 5000 characters per frame at a decent speed. I tested the same effect on a 2.x device, and all is working just perfect. So the effect is unhappily left out.

Today I implemented quickly the splash screen which will show some basic information about the project, current build number, and complete release notes for the current and all previous versions. The screen will be shown propably only in the development phase.

One more important thing is that the whole game, after the splash screen, will be locked to landscape mode. I thought about different game parts and how to organize the whole UI and at the end with landscape mode much more information can be shown.

After investing so much time in the project, it’s time to sit again and think about the next steps.

First of all I decided that I will use the ASCII graphics until the project is completely finished; now that’s for sure. But still, I want the game to look good even without real graphics and it would be a real challenge to do this, because I’m thinking about adding also some effects and animations. Yes, everything is represented only with text and symbols, but still, I can add unlimited layers of text to achieve some effects, like adding sprites in any other 2d game.

Also I will concentrate myself on parts before the actual gameplay, like showing the splash screen, intro and title screen, menues, selecting scenarios… etc. In other words, I will start from the beginning, trying to code everything so that it can be considered as the final implementation for the first couple of demo releases. Of course that means also that I’ll need more time for every part or feature, plus, I want the game to look nice.

One of the topics that I didn’t covered is the victory conditions definition for each scenario and each team, and also the in game event handler.

In the original game there are several ways to finish a scenario: eliminating one team member of the opposite team or all of them, eliminating special tiles on the map, evacuating own units… etc. So I’m massaging my brain cells last couple of days with thoughts how to define these conditions in the existing scenario model.

The other thing is the event handler. In some scenarios you can get reinforcements after a specific number of turns. That must be also defined in the scenario model and checked by the handler every turn.

Currently I’m putting all my thoughts on a paper and thinking about how to implement all these features with as less code as possible, so it will be easy later on to create all these conditions in a level editor.