Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows non-mouse navigation of the third and (for now) final minigame:
The week just past was another busy one, I feel, and another one focussed largely on navigation, if not entirely:
To start with, as shown above, I believe that I've completed non-mouse navigation in the translation minigame! Indeed, I believe that I've now completed the task of non-menu navigation! ^_^ (Barring any undiscovered issues that turn up later, of course.)
I believe that I mentioned previously that this minigame had proven particularly complex to implement navigation for.
Worse than that, however, was that I had noticed that it was somewhat of a chore to navigate. There were two main reasons for this, I think:
First, the word-tiles that compose the upper section of the minigame each have two parts: a row of letters, and a column of prospective word-roots. One could move from word-to-word via the letter-rows, but as there was one navigation-node per letter, that could be tedious. It was much quicker and more convenient to navigate via the columns, as there was only one per word-tile--but when no roots had yet been added to a word, the columns were unavailable...
Second, the lexicon that composes the lower section of the minigame connected to the upper part, as one might expect. However, the navigation-system was somewhat rigid in how it connected nodes, allowing a given node to connect to only one other in a given direction. What's more, the lexicon could scroll, meaning that there was no static relationship between a given lexicon-button and the word-tile above it. As a result, all lexicon-buttons navigated up to the bottom-leftmost word-tile--which was not always convenient, or intuitive, I fear.
The first of those problems was fairly easy to solve: I simply allowed the player to quickly cycle through word-tiles--more specifically, through the first letters of each--via the "next tab" and "previous tab" buttons, much as with the jigsaw minigame. It even uses a very similar implementation to that used in the jigsaw minigame, as I recall.
The second took a bit more work. In short, what I did was this: I modified the navigation system to optionally accept a list of navigation-nodes for a given direction. Then, when it encountered such a list during navigation, I had it find the list-entry that was nearest on the axis perpendicular to the direction of navigation--the x-axis when moving upwards, for example--and then navigate to that. Thus I was able to have the lexicon-buttons navigate up to whichever word-button was closest on the x-axis, even when scrolled!
Moving away from navigation, but remaining with the minigames, I believe that I mentioned last week that I intended to remove the ideogram minigame. In the week just past I enacted that intention.
This was a surprisingly involved process! There were a number of elements to remove, whether part of the minigame or simply references to it. Still, as I recall it didn't prove too hard, and the minigame is now gone. (Albeit with the code retained in a dumping-ground folder that I sometimes use for such things.)
The prologue level was, I believe, the only one that had an ideogram minigame. That minigame has now been replaced by four simple panels, which, when examined, provide the clues originally given by the minigame.
And aside from the above, I also made a number of changes and bug-fixes that don't seem worth mentioning here!
That, then, is all for this week! Stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
