Posted August 03, 2022 by Bob's Stuff
As the keen-eyed amongst you might have spotted, I've updated the project page with some newer images for the game's menu screens. Originally I was trying to stick to the template used by the isometric Ultimate Play The Game titles - having a full border around the options and such like - but they never had the option to redefine the keys, and it always irked me that the name of the game was displayed simply in text, a travesty given how beautiful the game logos are.
So, as a first step of getting back into this whole project after my hiatus I decided to start with refreshing those screens. The first thing to go was the full-screen surround, and the memory saved by removing the code & graphics for that allowed me to safely add the full graphical logo for the game. It loses a little of it's beauty by being a single colour, but I think it really improves the main menu. Removing the border has also had the effect of 'freeing' the various elements - they no longer appear as boxed-in as they once were.
The same theory was then applied to the character select screen - separate because each of the four characters has a wonderful little back-story which I felt had to be included in my version as well. Again, not having the full-screen surround make it all appear much less cramped, and giving the selected character a highlighted background improves the visibility of the state (you can't see it in the grab, but the selected character also animates)
So there, I've made a start on the code again, and things are beginning to progress. In my recent playing of the game I also spotted that the game map was incorrect - there was a sequence of rooms which the player couldn't get out of - so a quick check against the PC version indicated that I'd managed to swap a standard door for one which required a key, so a quick fix. The map has undergone so many changes since the development started that I'm not surprised that there's errors with it, but hopefully not too many. It also serves to remind me just how much play-testing this is going to need!