Laser Squad [Day 63] – Displaying unit info and inventory

This must be the most unproductive month since I started the project. I barely found some free time to work on the project by the end of the month.

I’m still working on the game setup part. Now, when the player is equipping units, I wanted to display also unit attributes, so appropriate equipment can be chosen for the units. I’m still having trouble to organize the UI in this mode of the game, I hope everything will look fine also on devices with smaller resolution.

 

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Laser Squad [Day 62] – Continuing with the Game Setup screen

It’s been a while since my last post. I’m occupied with other things and I barely have time to work on my project. I’m still on the setup screen, mainly designing the armoring and equipping units part.

The good news is that I repaired my phone, and I’m happy that my device is working like before. Therefore I attached some screenshots of the first part of the Game Setup screen below (day 58).

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Laser Squad [Day 61] – Development onResume

After a one month break, I’m continuing my work on the game. I still didn’t fix my phone, so all screenshots from the current version of the game will be posted later.

Today I needed a couple of hours to analyze the code and see where I stopped with development. Currently I’m working on the game setup, where the player needs to equip his units with armor.

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Laser Squad [Day 60] – Development onPause

I’m on a one-month vacation since yesterday. During my vacation I planned to test the whole game and all the things I did so far. Unfortunately after the first day of my vacation I dropped my Nexus on the floor. The display is totally broken, and touch events don’t work. Since this is the main development and test device, I’m unable to test and post screenshots until I fix my phone.

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Laser Squad [Day 58] – Game Setup screen

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.

 

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Laser Squad [Day 57] – Playing animations

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.

 

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Laser Squad [Day 56] – Trying out some backgrounds

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.

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Laser Squad [Day 55] – Title screen

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.

   

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Laser Squad [Day 54] – New menu controller

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.

   

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