Progress Report

Greetings, everyone!

Wow, this has been a great week for my progress, that's for sure. The ball really got rolling, and pieces I had been setting up for ages started falling into place. 

As I write this, the collection part of the deck builder is fully functional. You can see this in the attached screenshot. Please, PLEASE keep in mind that this is a work in progress and can change a lot before you get to play with it, but the general layout should remain the same. 

In the screenshot, the entire left part of the screen, with the cards, works and fills itself up based on your card collection. In this list, you can see all the cards you have collected so far and empty spots for cards you still haven't obtained (seen here as faded card backs). Each card in your collection has a plus and a minus button for adding and removing it from your deck. Up to three boxes between those buttons represent the number of duplicates you own. 

Unless something changes, the plan is that cards of the Common and Uncommon rarities can appear up to three times each in your collection, here represented as three boxes. Rare cards can appear only once, which you can see with the "Turned On" card in this screenshot. 

The bright boxes show that you own this copy of the card, while faded boxes indicate how many of that card you are missing before you own them all. For example, my collection in this screenshot contains a single copy of "Coffee." However, I can have three copies in total. I have two copies of "Camera Adjustments," which means I miss only one more. "Deep Breath" appears three times in my collection, meaning I have every copy of that card that I can ever get. 

This also means you can never have more than three copies of a single card in your deck, forcing you to diversify somewhat. 

Speaking of decks, these boxes will also show how many copies you have added of each card to your current deck. The deck itself has yet to be implemented for this screen. It would be shown to the right, but that area does nothing yet, even though all the buttons are already hooked up to their appropriate event handlers. When you use the plus button underneath a card, you add a copy of that card to your deck (again, this is not yet implemented). When you press the minus button, you remove a copy from the deck. A card in your deck will be shown as a filled box underneath the card, making it easy for you to tell at a glance which cards are in use and which are not.

One feature I didn't add yet is to fade out the plus and minus buttons when you cannot press them. For example, in every case in this screenshot, the minus button should be inactive since you have no cards in your deck and thus cannot remove any of them. This should be simple enough to do once the deck works, however.

In addition, I have implemented the ability to double-click any of these cards to bring up their large view with rules description, just like it is during regular gameplay.

The collection view is the most unpredictable, complicated part of this update (or so I expect), so seeing it implemented like this feels very good indeed. While there are still plenty of challenges for me to solve before version 2.0 of Snapshot is ready for release, this is a significant milestone on the way there.

Let's see if I can't implement the deck before the next progress report...

Until next time!