Glass - June Progress Update 2

Level selection and saving game progress is done. It took longer than expected, since I had to rewrite a bunch of code so that levels could be organized into "packs" and load nicely. The nice thing about the code, though, is that the layout of the buttons is procedurally generated. If I add more levels and more buttons, which I will, the size and arrangement of the buttons will automatically change to accommodate it. The levels are also loaded so that adding more levels to the game is easy and requires no additional coding. Making it this way took a little more time and planning, but updating the game in the future will be much easier.

Needs more levels.

Stuff that still needs to be done:

• Tutorials
• Level design
• In-game menu
• Sound effects/music

My goal is to have the tutorials, in-game menu, and the code for the sound effects done before the end of June. The audio itself will be interesting, because I have absolutely no experience, equipment, or software, but I'll figure something out.

Glass - June Progress Update 1

Thankfully, summer session is leaving me with a decent amount of free time, which hopefully means more progress if I can focus, which I haven't been able to do very well. I suppose that regular updates will help motivate me to get stuff done though, so I might start doing that.

Most progress since the last update was spent squishing a few bugs, which were all sitting around in code that I haven't touched for months. In other words, they've been around for a very long time, and I'm somewhat surprised that I didn't catch them earlier. The biggest one is an issue with how lights interact with rounded mirrors. I somehow managed to screw up the collision detection completely and failed to realize for seven months or so, mainly because I didn't actually have any rounded mirrors in the game until recently. It turns out that the botched code came from one of my 3 am half-asleep coding sessions, when I tried to add a small improvement to the code for mirrors and ended up making it more stupid. It's fixed now.

Also, I've finally gotten around to being able to draw text onto the screen, which means the "Play" button actually says "Play" now. I assume that people will be less confused about what to do the title screen now.

By the end of this coming weekend, I'm hoping to have the level selection screen mostly done, which also means figuring out a good way of saving player progress as they unlock levels.

The circle on the right is the mirror.
The white line is the laser. This is clearly broken.

Fixed. These screenshots are of a program
that I wrote to visualize the optics engine behind Glass,
before it was actually a game.