Red Mawashi's Blog

I appreciate the irony of posting two days after I said I’ll try posting daily.

Yesterday, I did not get much done.  I sent an email reply to the artist, clarifying a point.  She definitely made more progress than me, yesterday.

Today, I shall strive to outpace her, however.  I have a standard workday ahead of me, with dinner plans set with some friends for 5pm.  I plan on working on the menu screen, as well as saving settings from said menu screen.  The menu screen should have a “Start Game” option, a “Difficulty” option, and an “Exit to Arcade” option.  Stretch goal for the day:  save the difficulty setting.

All of this, of course, means that I need to start slacking off IMMEDIATELY.

How exciting!

Follow-up (4:15pm):
Rough drafts of all items above have been completed.  We have a menu that now immediately follows the splash screen.  There’s no fancy background yet, because I haven’t figured out how I want the menu to look.  The “Exit to Arcade” command works, saving whatever difficulty you had set previously.

In Windows, it appears that the SignedInGamers collection is empty, so I had to do some tricks to get the filesave to work per-user like I want it to work on the 360.  I DO need to test the file save on the Xbox, to confirm that the per-user settings are retained properly.  Maybe I can test that tonight.

Difficulty is based on the built-in functionality.  And the GameScreen that’s in there now is just the default from the GameStateManagement sample.

Speaking of which – I’ve taken some code from the GameStateManagement sample, but also improved on it.  In their sample, each window seemed to be in charge of loading the next windows in the sequence.

I moved that functionality into a GameService, so that the GameScreen objects do not have to be aware of what follows them, and neither does the ScreenManager.  It’s all hard-coded now into a TransitionManager, but I think it would be pretty sweet to switch the transition elements into XML.  I’m DEFINITELY saving that for the end, though, since it’s not specifically a gameplay element.

Additionally, I’ve set up subversion, so that I can maintain my code remotely and not have to stress about anything being lost.  It should also let me share my code with the artist, as I progress.

Finally, I did a little work on the icons for the game executable.  Nothing I’m proud of, mind you, but I’m working towards an overall design that I really think I’m going to like.  Of course, the more I think about those things, the more work it means for the artist.  ;)

How exciting!