I whipped together a quick little demo to test out a bunch of different things. It's no surprise the game crashes sometimes, here and there. Hopefully with others testing it out, I can get some better ideas as to why. On top of that, I'm concerned with how the game controls, so, hopefully I'll get some good insight there, too.

Finally putting the editor through its paces was fun. The number one complaint I have is not having a dialog for overwriting an already existing file. I also don't have the ability to quick save a file once it's opened. That is, you have to manually select it every single time from the file browser during a save. That's a pain! Through the process of putting together a mini little world with obstacles I did solve a bunch of bugs I wouldn't have otherwise realized existed. The engine is getting better day by day.

In other news, Zep's Dreamland goes on sale for the iPhone tomorrow. If you liked the classic, challenge yourself on the go with over 50 new iPhone-exclusive levels. Yeah!

With the editor essentially revamped, it was time to add in a very important feature to the game: the ability to obtain/collect powerups. There are a few powerups that can be obtained throughout the game (as it is planned so far), so there needs to be a decent way to actually "get" them. I opted for the Metroid/Vania style, where all you need to do is walk over/touch an iconized representation of the powerup and its yours. Instead of heavily special casing the powerup objects I went the route of making them an in-game object just like any other object that appears in the game world. You add it to the map using the editor just like you would with NPCs or other world objects. This works out pretty well.

While I was thinking about it after the fact, because I did things in this style one could simply place down multiple instances of a single powerup. This could actually be pretty cool. Since you could have more than one of the same powerup littered on a map, it might be interesting to make a certain aspect of the gameplay force the user to actually lose their powerups sometimes. They could then re-obtain them at a later time in a later place. Neat!

It took a little while, and the iconized representations don't look particularly nice, but they get the job done. All place holders. Once you walk over the icon it will shrink out of view and the player will then be granted the powers of whatever powerup they just picked up. I'd like to make some sort of fanfare or a way to make it obvious what has just happened, but that will have to wait for later. Ideally I'd like the icons to be obvious in themselves and not necessarily have to show text to the player when the obtain a powerup.

While tinkering around with this in the editor I realized there is no way to reposition a world object once it is placed on the map. I guess I'm not surprised I hadn't noticed it earlier since I haven't been really pushing the editor to its limits. That won't last too long though. I hope to whip up a new demo to share with friends that shows off how the powerups works. I need feedback!

I realized after implementing much of the menu widgets that I was missing one major key component: keyboard shortcuts. It took a little bit of finagling to get the keyboard control to work properly, but it's a major win in terms of making the game editor nicer to use. The biggest hurdle was to re-architect a bunch of the menu logic to allow for the callback actions to be triggered even when they weren't currently open. A little bit of dancing was done to make keyboard and mouse control play nice with each other without stomping on one another's turf. Currently a menu item only allows for a shortcut of a single modifier and single regular key. They both have to be set, or else the shortcut is discarded. That is, you can't have menu items that are triggered by pressing a single key, like "a". I may extend this in the future to allow for single key triggers, as well as multiple modifiers or keys at once.

With the GUI elements mostly wrapped up, I began the work of replacing much of the cryptic keyboard driven editor with them. The editor now feels a lot more robust and, well, "real". Of course, there are still some special keyboard controls that are necessary, but mostly everything can be done from the menu. There is still a bit of functionality to convert over, but if I had to estimate I would say that about 85-90% of the conversion is complete.

One of these days I'll run out of fancy things to add to the engine or the editor, and will have to bite the bullet and start spriting.