Thursday 22 May 2014

Inspecting objects

I have wired up the inspector panels for the objects, meaning I can now edit their dimensions precisely, tint them, pick textures and whatever other properties are needed! It almost-almost only needs saving and loading now, in fact, that's the next step! Before that, though, I'll need to break up the level loading in the game from two separate files: the static scene composition, and the character scripting, because I think this editor will only be able to create the static scenes.

I've also done away with the green wireframes!



Thursday 8 May 2014

Playing God

I can now create 3 types of objects: Planets, Coins and Stars. I'm not sure what the coins and stars will be used for, but the general pattern is there are 3 stars per level which are difficult to get to but don't stop you from finishing any level; and you collect coins to buy stuff like power-ups or rockets.

Objects can be dragged or resized using the handles on them, but they don't yet snap to the grid.

I added an object management table in the Objects side bar, but the objects don't yet belong to any layer nor can they be turned ON/OFF.

NSBezierPath is cool to work with to programmatically draw vector graphics. I drew the stars and the coins in Excel art and picked the coordinates visually - that reminded me of how I used square paper to draw graphics for the ZX Spectrum.



The Level inspector also has working World dimensions:


Friday 2 May 2014

Building up a Game Editor

Starting to get the hang of Cocoa. The grid options window works great and I've added tabs on the sidebar for different purposes. Objects is where you instantiate game objects from; Layers is for creating and selecting Sprite and Image layers; Inspector is where you go to change the game object's properties; and Level has some general level properties. Doesn't do much yet, though!...