Terminal Jam

yangamedev · 2018-11-01T23:51:38Z

ConQuest - Day 1 First day was about getting the framework setup and procrastinating delaying thinking about what kind of game I'm actually going to make. I know that I want to make a raw console ASCII game as I've been wanting to do that for awhile, but I also wanted to make it web-capable so I could host it directly on itch and spare everyone a stinky .exe. I decided to use Unity but set the goal of having only one set of game and view code, treating console and Unity strictly as the view as I'm lazy and don't feel like doing twice the work. Injecting I/O handlers into an agnostic game. The Unity bootstrap looks roughly the same. The console side is refreshingly easy of course -- print some statements and block the entire thread until the user performs input. Unity isn't setup that way however and precluded me from using one set of code for driving the whole process. I reluctantly opted to use a non-blocking input on the console side so that the Unity code could do the same, and both would poll their respective input. The game code is a .dll which gets loaded by Unity and the agnostic view code is injected with input and output handlers -- the latter being just straight up Debug.Log statements to make sure it worked. Then came the work of reproducing a console grid in Unity which is a big texture comprised of elements from the ASCII spritesheets I linked earlier. I'm using GUI.DrawTexture to get started but will probably draw them on a plane's material texture later. Getting pixel-perfect lettering is tough as you have to fight off Unity's modern features but a DrawTexture takes away most of the fighting so long as you're scaling by an integer multiple to fill whatever window you're drawing to. I assume it doesn't spell out any swear words, but it'd be cool if it did Once I knew I could draw whatever symbol with whatever color I liked, I implemented the interface that the game view was expecting to perform console writes and made it behave the same way as the console game, including maintaining a cursor position and waiting for input before finishing the world's most boring game: Lastly I wanted to close the loop to make sure this worked out alright with the web build, as I forget to check the output in game jams and it always burns me. I'll delay uploading it to itch as I assume it'll work just fine (or I just don't wanna get laughed off the site by uploading this joke of a build): Thinking of doing a BBS-style crawl or a screen-and-menu-based affair, really depends on how much time I have and what kind of game I'm trying to pull off. I've decided against doing a roguelike or any other top-down map style because I've done that to death and I'd rather go really retro for this. That's future me's problem!