Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: More Eyes

Last time, I reported that I was continuing the work of finishing my second Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project called Clown Alley Creator, a creativity tool about creating your own fun clowns.

Some efforts of polish are relatively easy, but others take a bit more work.

Sprints 2024-19: Polishing/Finishing

Completed:

• Options Screen mute buttons should match in-game buttons
• When no clowns exist in gallery, show text and arrow pointing to New button so player is guided towards what to do

I’m definitely in the final phases of this project, as I am either addressing things I’ve already identified or I am playing the game to discover what to address next.

Long ago I created a simple options menu accessible from the main menu. It allowed the player to toggle music and sound effects audio using buttons that had text that said what they were.

In the game itself, however, I created a modal menu with different buttons based on icons. It would be nice if those buttons matched in the options menu.

Now they do:

Now you might notice that this screen does not have a background image. It is one of those “I’ll get around to it later” kinds of things that I soon need to address because, well, it’s later.

I wanted to give new players some guidance. Upon starting a game, you will enter the gallery. When there are clowns already created, you’ll see them all here. However, when starting a brand new game, you’ll find that the gallery of clowns will be empty. The first thing to do is create a clown, which might not be obvious to know to do nor how to get started doing so.

So I made a very obvious animated arrow pointing at the New Clown button:

Maybe I can try to make it more circus-y, but it works for now.

Meanwhile, I realized that I still need to create more options to customize your clowns, so I created a few variations on eyes that include eyelashes.

One thing I realized, though, is that I need to add some code to handle rendering eyes so that the left eye and the right eye are mirrors of each other. Right now, I just render the same sprite on the left and right, which works when the eye sprite is identical on both sides.

But if I want to have flared eyelashes or otherwise have eye shapes that aren’t perfectly symmetrical, I will need to render the right eye as a flipped version of the left eye. It isn’t something my existing code framework does, but since it is based on top of SDL2, which does support it, it should be quick to add. I ended the week working on part of that effort, and I expect to finish it early this week.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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