Here’s this week’s progress report for new updates to Toytles: Leaf Raking, my family-friendly leaf-raking business simulation available for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.
Get it at the Toytles: Leaf Raking page.
I talked about fixing some typos and adding screen transitions in last week’s sprint report.
Sprint 19: Screen transitions & time-based dialogue
- Create screen transitions when entering/leaving yard
- Story progression when finishing a yard (unique monthly client dialogue w/ difference between clear/uncleared yards
I did only 3 hours of game development last week.
I think I expected that I would accomplish a lot more. I had even taken a day off from the day job.
But in case you missed it, last week coincided with the U.S. Election. Normally we can call it the night of, or we wait for the Supreme Court to tell us who won, but we spent the better part of a week paying attention to the news.
The memes have been great, by the way.
say what you will but trump was good for small business and that business was called four seasons total landscaping
— #AbolishThePolice (@ADAMATOMIC) November 8, 2020
The US Presidential Election via Donovan and Algeria. pic.twitter.com/XAy1BfnQoI
— Stu Holden (@stuholden) November 6, 2020
Imagine this is how you found out. https://t.co/zcKvjxb4pK
— Iron Spike (@Iron_Spike) November 6, 2020
I look forward to not worrying that my kids see the President’s behavior as something to emulate.
Anyway, I decided to quickly hack together fade out/fade in transitions between screens.
Why did I hack it? I didn’t want to spend the time and effort to create a high-quality implementation until I knew how it was going to look and feel.
So I treated it as an experiment. And I liked the result! It felt nice, and added a sense of polish to the game. And the investment on my part to find out that it would work out was minimal.
Experiments like this are the kind of thing I want to feel comfortable doing more often, especially early in a project when there are so many questions to answer about a potential game’s design space.
Once I had determined that I liked the look and feel of the fade out/fade in transition, I threw out the hack and started over, only this time test-driving my solution and being mindful of wanting something solid to build upon. I even managed to refactor out part of the neighborhood-transition code so that it relies on my new general transition code.
I only got to put in about an hour or so of effort into it. I expect to finish up the work this week, and then I’ll get started on the new dialogue. I don’t know if I’ll finish it all this week, but once the dialogue is done, I’ll cut a new release.
Thanks for reading!
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