ExploRPG DevBlog 2
28/6/16
At this point in development, the game is not currently ready to pursue a mass audience or public recognition. At this early stage in development, I am mostly writing these devblogs for the purpose of looking back at the development history of the game - some people find that interesting, after all.
It’s been a while since I’ve last updated, so I’ll briefly cover the last few months in this entry.
The engine that the game is being developed with, JMonkeyEngine (JME), recommends using a toolset called NiftyGUI to handle user interfaces (UI), such as the title screen, pause screen, health display, etc. It claims to make programming user interfaces easier, which is something that I must, frankly, disagree with. The alternative is to use different toolsets, which are not supported natively and, thus, require more effort to integrate into the engine, or to develop the UI manually using the GUI Node, a node that renders to the screen after all other rendering processes complete to display graphical elements that should be rendered “on the screen.” The downside to using the GUI node is that the developer must manually handle issues such as scaling the UI to differing screen sizes that the users may have.
I began by attempting to create the game’s title screen, using a temporary logo that I mocked up (ExploRPG is the working title, not the final title) and a static image background (the intention is for the final game to display random areas of the in-game map in real time). If you are curious, this is the mockup (full disclosure: the background image is something I found on Google and is merely temporary):
28/6/16
At this point in development, the game is not currently ready to pursue a mass audience or public recognition. At this early stage in development, I am mostly writing these devblogs for the purpose of looking back at the development history of the game - some people find that interesting, after all.
It’s been a while since I’ve last updated, so I’ll briefly cover the last few months in this entry.
The engine that the game is being developed with, JMonkeyEngine (JME), recommends using a toolset called NiftyGUI to handle user interfaces (UI), such as the title screen, pause screen, health display, etc. It claims to make programming user interfaces easier, which is something that I must, frankly, disagree with. The alternative is to use different toolsets, which are not supported natively and, thus, require more effort to integrate into the engine, or to develop the UI manually using the GUI Node, a node that renders to the screen after all other rendering processes complete to display graphical elements that should be rendered “on the screen.” The downside to using the GUI node is that the developer must manually handle issues such as scaling the UI to differing screen sizes that the users may have.
I began by attempting to create the game’s title screen, using a temporary logo that I mocked up (ExploRPG is the working title, not the final title) and a static image background (the intention is for the final game to display random areas of the in-game map in real time). If you are curious, this is the mockup (full disclosure: the background image is something I found on Google and is merely temporary):