Oh my, have I let this project fall into the pit of procrastination lately. "Good thing I've noticed it happen, though", I thought, whilst pulling the project back up on a string whilst it was an inch away from the incinerator.
I usually spend my time thinking about projects, and I (most of the time) plan things out. That actually works well; It keeps me hyped for the next release, which allows me to stuff a lot of content each day. I also blog (here) every week; at least, that's the plan; and it keeps my interest rate for the game at a healthy level of "wanna make more o' that".
I kinda messed up lately, though! I was working on a big new feature, namely the editor for the game. The editor would also have to come with a text editor, allowing you to program your own blocks (within limits) in a very simplistic, custom made programming language. I reached the end of the week and was planning on blogging, but I felt like the editor wasn't completely ready yet.
So I delayed the blog. Thought I could get away with it on the next one, by saying that it's now finished and looks cool. Oh, was I wrong. What happened instead was the opposite of what you want to happen: I simply stopped caring.
Anyhow, I'm back now to work more on this editor. It's actually pretty cool and looking alright, so I thought I could share a nice screenshot here. It's... euhm... screenshotthursday? Anyone?
Here's the editor in a picture.
As of right now, you can open both the level files and the custom block files and edit them all you want. It'll colour code the text correctly, and you can open up multiple windows at the same time. The editor is a bit 'window-tastic' as of right now, but I'll see if I'll put effort into fixing that in the future.
The window currently focussed on is an example of a so-called 'blockscript', which is the actual code the block runs. For example, under the PROPERTIES category, this block contains 'gravity' and 'selectable'. If you were to remove 'gravity' from the PROPERTIES category, then this custom block suddenly would have no gravity anymore.
I'm also planning on adding a couple of events, such as onCreate, onTick, onDestroy, the regulars. You can then go ahead and add a bunch of pre-written scripts to let that block do anything you want it to, such as; creating blocks, displacing blocks, re-colouring blocks, etc.
Oh, and I figured out why the framerate was so bad on particular machines. I just upped the bloom a little too much... There's an option for that now ('cause it still looks pretty!)
I'm probably not going to include the text editor into the Android version of the game, because that will only contain the physical level editor (so no code required).
Alright, I'll be working a little more on the project, and catch y'all next week!
