What I want to discuss is the programming of the game itself and how the game is now looking rather fetching indeed. (For a bit of background info have a quick read of my previous programming post)
Now fortunately for me, and for anyone downloading the game, I have managed to figure out a lot of the code and what it all means. It’s actually surprisingly simple once you work it out! So that means I've been able to customise my other menus plus I've made various other tweaks. The Tailor menu currently looks like this:
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| Tailor Menu for Hadron Gateway |
Which, like the main menu, is an imagemap so the code then looks like:
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| Tailor Menu Code |
The load and save screen are identical imagemaps so I'll show only one:
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| Save/Load Menu for Hadron Gateway |
It has 6 pages each with 6 slots which works out at 12 per story. That might be more than enough for those who like to save over their last save point, however, for those who create dozens of saves in one sitting, you'll have to discipline yourselves! Presenting the Code for the save screen:
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| Save/Load Menu Code |
Next is an example of one of the several confirmation screens. It does what it says on the box really...
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| Confirmation Screen for Hadron Gateway |
It was extremely easy to code and consisted of only a few lines and no setbacks (very rare)
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| Confirmation Code |
As you can see, each menu fits the same circular composition keeping the whole thing pleasingly consistent and entirely different from the default settings. Everything is looking great but the only problem is that the game file now contains so many images that it’s taking up more space than I'm comfortable with. To control the file size I shrank the dimensions of the game overall and will have to plan the illustrations very carefully but even then it’s going to be pretty huge.
Its slighly frustrating that despite working out how to put the game together without using imagemaps I'm still stuck because of the filter - It covers the whole picture to give each menu its colour so I can’t use anything other than an imagemap... so leave the problem with me and I'll figure something out! At least I learned something anyway.
I have also added transitions between menus to stop it feeling so abrupt when the buttons are clicked and I've dropped in a couple of splash screens to introduce each story. I won’t be spoiling you with those though. Since this post contains more than enough pretty pictures, I'll leave it at that and show you more of the fun stuff next time!
