Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Backgrounds, Menus, and Plans

In my last report, I had started work on implementing my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool.

I continued the initial work of the project.

Sprint 2024-2: Menus

Planned and complete:

• Create a main menu

Unplanned and complete:

• Create an exit menu

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Create Gallery View menu

You know, reading the above, it makes it sound like I had a bunch of “unplanned” work, when really I just mean that at the start of the sprint I had identified only one set of tasks to work on and the rest were expected to be pulled in from my project backlog as I finished work.

I need a better way to report this progress.

Anyway, I finished the main menu work, which involved adding variations on the buttons so that they can be animated.

But I was unhappy with the background, and I ended up redoing it. It is still not great, but it is an improvement, and I like the look of the circus tent more.

The new font for the title looks great, too, and I decided to use it for the buttons as well.

Next up was sticking the landing and creating a background for the quit verification screen:

I liked the idea of the Quit button leading you to the Great Egress, which comes from a potentially apocryphal story about PT Barnum.

As you can see, I need to figure out a single art style. I’m kind of all over the place right now. Expect more iterations in the future.

About halfway through the week I needed to leave town for a family emergency. I was in the middle of working on the first in-game screen. Basically, you press the Play button, and it should take you to the Clown Gallery menu.

Unfortunately, other than creating the menu background, I hadn’t gotten to the actual menu options. So for this coming week I will add a button to return to the Main Menu and another button to Create a New Clown, which will take you to the Create a Clown set of menus.

This entire project is just a series of menus, so expect a lot of talk about menus and options.

I did discover that the code for a ButtonControl had a defect in it.

ButtonControl is some of the oldest code in GBLib, my bespoke collection of code I’ve built up over many years of refusing to use an existing game engine. It is based upon the concept of Immediate Mode GUIs, primarily from Jari Komppa’s imgui tutorials. Since my code was test-driven, it has a suite of unit tests, so I added a new test to capture the bug, which has to do with the button’s state getting reset from “active” to “hot” too fast, which explains why sometimes when you click a button that you don’t see it being pressed down.

I can’t believe I’ve ignored this issue for so long and across so many games, because it is a pretty obvious bug, but I suppose I’m paying a lot more attention to the game’s responsiveness to the player in recent years, and maybe this brand new project has almost nothing else to distract me from noticing it.

So expect that to be fixed, too.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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