Creating menus

Just a small update!

The Spring semester is over so I'm spending more time on coding up Rawr Rinth. Ben has been working on game art and I'm just adding placeholder art as I build out other things. It's mostly just been implementing the menus so far, but we will be working on levels soon, too.

Platform

We've decided to just focus on PC development right now in order to not slowdown development. If we were targeting PlayDate AND PC I would have to figure out how to write C++ code (and SFML?) for PlayDate, or write the game in C, or write the game in Lua. As it is, if we just focus on PC for now, we can continue using my Chalo Engine, which already has a lot of boilerplate already implemented and just makes my life a whole lot easier!

Some features that are already implemented in the Chalo Engine:

• State manager / state class interface
• Asset managers
• Config manager / config file loading
• Menu manager / markup language for building menus
• Language manager / multiple language file support
• Accessibility core / currently just support to toggle Open Dyslexic font on and off.
  • Currently the game is planned to be grayscale, but I will eventually implement a Color Blind feature (color remapper?) in the engine itself so any of our subsequent games can use it without additional work.
  • The game isn't going to have voice acting but the engine will also eventually support toggling on subtitles and/or closed captioning.

Keeping it simple

Right now my focus is on not being the bottleneck slowing down development. This is why we're focusing just on PC right now, but also my decision that we will use Tiled for maps, instead of me building a level editor from scratch, which would slow things down a lot. I want to get the core game completed and then go back and make updates and polish it up from there. Maybe there will be a level editor in the final version, or maybe it will just allow importing Tiled files. Maybe I'll write a small port of it in Lua for PlayDate, but that will be down the line.

Anyway, here are some screenshots of the game with its rough graphics so far. I'll be working on this more over the weekend so we can begin building out levels.

--Rachel