We have a unicorn! And finally an application icon! Oh and a rainbow.

It’s been kinda slow making Unicorn Shoppe lately, I’ve been “busy” playing Batman Arkham Asylum (amazing game by the way) and work.

I did however manage to work on buttons a little bit. I added the extra space require for them not to overlap with the background of the game and I added some functionality, so they actually do something.

Originally I wanted the buttons to be pictures. There’d be one for just a regular button and then another picture for the pressed version. So when you’d click the button the game would just swap out the base button and switch it for the pressed button. And when you’d let go it would switch back to the default button.

I like this idea at first because I thought it would yield nicer looking buttons and “animation” but today I realized that I wanted to have disabled buttons. I could have easily requested a third button from my artist, or hell, I could just opened up Photoshop and add in a transparent grey layer over the base button.

But, I decided to just use Java’s drawing capabilities. This one I don’t need any other images and I can change the colours very easily, or even randomize them on startup or something.

Things left to Do:

1. Get timers working during game and when game is closed.
2. Replace placeholder items
3. Get a background for the button layer of the game
4. Tutorial/First time launch mode

Well I’m almost finished. I have the game running outside a development environment, it saves and loads on starting and quitting and each item has it’s own timer for updating.

Things left to do:

1. Make the buttons actually do something
2. Test if input is behaving properly (already a couple of issues)
3. Get an icon
4. Remove placeholder images
5. Expand size of game so the buttons don’t take up room
6. Balance game, tweak numbers for intended pacing times

I was hoping to post a little more frequently with smaller updates but I have this project spread out through three computers. So the images I do save tend to lose relevance as soon as a switch computers.

Anyways, I’ve got a template button in place now. You can’t see it in the image but when you click on a button it changes colours; in the final version it’ll hopefully just look like it’s being pressed.

Since I’m making a throttling game (or a game that forces you to pace yourself) it’s pretty crucial that I have some kinda of saving system so I started working on that. It’s almost finished actually, I just need to “hook” everything together.

I got my Unicorn game actually “running” today. There’s a little money counter too! Text is a bit hard to read though.

‘Nuff said.

The way I designed the input parsing thing to work is pretty robust, but it allows for some strange combinations. For example, “pick up garbage” will work and “garbage pick up” will also work. “Pick garbage,” “Garbage pick,” are good too. It even works with “Pick up the god damn garbage you sadist.” Yeah that works too!

It’s alive! I got the engine to process and utilize our data correctly. Now we just need to figure out level transitions and the other stuff I mentioned.

Maybe I can get this up for show sometime later today

I got the input processor kinda implemented, it doens’t really work right now but the logic is good. Tomorrow level one will probably be done!

What’s next? Getting the input to actually work, then level transitions. After that it’s the little optional things like music and animation. I don’t care about animation for the prototype but music would be interesting.