This week was a bit slow. We're in the middle of trying to buy a new apartment (and sell our existing one) which has been particularly stressful.
The main brunt of the work for this week has been reworking the existing UI in the main menu to match the newly made graphic designs. There was one major issue preventing me getting started with this though. The UI framework I'd built was primarily built for mobile screens.
I'd made some relatively hacky changes to it for Interloper to allow it to sort of conform to larger screens, but at its core it only ever allowed one "view" on screen at a time. What I really wanted was to show multiple views on screen at once on a larger screen (iPads, desktops and tv's). This should make the game feel more native across the board, but this provides a bit of a technical challenge.
three screenshots of the mobile version of exo editor flow of the game. The first shows the core edit screen where you can change your equipment, the second shows a painting screen where you can pick the colours of your exo and the third shows a saved loadouts screen, allowing you to pick from a pre-built loadout
A screenshot of the desktop version of the exo editor, combining all three screens into one cohesvie flow for the desktop version of the game.
I needed to change my existing UI framework from a view to view based system to a ViewController with subviews whose visibility is controlled by a media query. So in the above example, we've got three views that can transition to each other on mobile, but all three are visible on desktop. There's some subtler differences too, the navigation buttons are gone, and there's only one heading. The general concept is that the UI should be grouped into these larger views, then when it comes to mobile, inject a navigation layer between the sub views.
A gif showing a ui wireframe morphing from mobile, with a single view, to larger screens, splitting into multiple views
So I ended up spending half the week retooling my underlying UI tools to support this paradigm. The end result works pretty much as expected. Supporting all these various aspect ratios is a bit of a pain, but I think it'll be worth it in the end. So far this week beyond the system upgrade I managed to get both the main menu and the campaign choice views complete, only ten more pages worth of this to go! (wish me luck)
A gif of the New Campaign screen, changing size and positions depending on the screen it's on
Beyond the UI work this week I also spent some time finalising my content for the Australian governments Emerging GameMakers fund application. I realised after submitting the application that it's really for... game ideas and games in preproduction... not... games that are in beta. Whoops. Ah well, good experience.