Halcyon menu work
Added 2021-08-13 21:09:54 +0000 UTCHey all, just wanted to send an update along. The past few weeks I've been working through the title/menu system for Halcyon. While kind of unexciting (it's just menus!), I want the initial impressions of the game to be good, so I wanted menus that looks and feel really nice.
Ellen (frankengraphics) mocked up some nice menus with transitions, so I've been busy making them work. With anything on the NES, small simple things end up taking a lot of time:
- making planet Halcyon stay in place at the bottom while the menus scroll in different directions above was a pain. Because there are no steady background elements above it, I couldn't easily use a normal sprite 0 hit technique, and had to use constant-timed code instead.
- I spent a lot of time on the preview screen before loading a game. This is completely unnecessary work (how much time will you really spend previewing what you load?), but I really thought it would add a bit of flair to the game. Smoothly building the preview screen (with lots of possible items, and possible tiles for the minimap, while including the planet below) was a bit more tedious than I expected, but I'm pretty happy with the results (although there are still some glitches with where the items display)
Some of the other pieces (music player and credits viewer) aren't finished yet, but they're coming! Meanwhile Ellen is working away at the music for the game, which I'll hope to demo soon!
As usual, you can download work-in-progress builds from https://www.bitethechili.com/patreon/
Thanks again for your support!
