Well, it’s 12:30am and I’m finishing up a productive coding evening. It’s going to be hard to sleep because I’m excited about the stuff I got done and I’m hopped up on caffeine!

I actually wasn’t even going to post because I wanted to do a few more tweaks before rendering a video but then I realized two things:

  1. This is my 100th checkin to SVN. That’s postworthy!
  2. I probably won’t get to work on Whirly much the rest of the week. I usually don’t work on Wednesday nights, I hope to go mountain biking on Thursday and we have company on Friday/Saturday.

 

So, tonight I sketched out an initial concept for the hud. Created it in Illustrator, applied the effects I use to get the old-newspaper style in Photoshop and then broke it into components and rebuilt the components as a scene in the Sprite Editor. That’s my usual design process. Then I created the Hud entity in Glue, added the scene and my custom code to get it working and added them to the base level object that all multiplayer levels derive from. Thus is a new component born. That sounds a little easier than it is for me but it was a pretty smooth session overall.

Along the way I figured out a new way to clamp textures (check out the HUD overheat meter in the video) to create more visually-interesting meters via this tutorial:
http://www.flatredball.com/frb/docs/index.php?title=FlatRedBall.Sprite.TopTextureCoordinate

 

Other small improvements:

  • Cleaned up level borders to tidy up the newspaper feel
  • Added rotating sun to the city level
  • Fixed some visual glitches here and there
  • Replaced the game timer font
  • Cleaned up a few bits of ugly code