More Progress

I'm still waiting for a few assets from the guy who made the initial assets for me, so some of my progress has been waiting on that, but I've still been able to make progress elsewhere. For example, in my last post I mentioned how I couldn't quite get high scores to work, and that has finally been resolved. Funny story? It was broken because of one line of code *I* put in that forced the score to display as 0. So even though everything else with high score and saving that score was working, the display part was not. Imagine my surprise when I was debugging and seeing the global variable holding the number it needed to, but nothing else. Oi.

Some other stuff I've done:

• The start screen/main menu is in place. I have placeholder buttons for now which look ugly, but they will eventually be replaced by nice icons. The start screen has five actions that you can do from it: start the game, go to the options page, check out the leaderboards (still WIP), see your achievements, watch the credit reel, and head to the shop.
• The options screen is the only one of these screens (minus the main game, of course) that has been fleshed out. It's simple, to match the game, but it allows you to change game audio. This was challenging at first, because the logic to change a playing song is not easy straight up, but I added global variables to control BGM and SFX, and it made life SO much easier. So yeah, now you can change the music and sound effects to different volumes and independent of one another. I'm still deciding on if I want an option there to allow the player to clear the high score.
•  I've set up the framework for achievements. That is to say that for the most part, every achievement in the game has a criteria to make it work, and I have those  criteria in place. I just haven't linked the actual achievements themselves.
• I finished the credit roll, which makes me emotional in every game I do, I swear.
• Achievements, Leaderboard, and Shop are still heavily under construction, as they require a lot more knowledge about them that I just don't have yet. I'm thinking about releasing the game before Achievements and Leaderboard are done, and updating the game later with those features, but I can't do that with IAPs. They're going to be the only way I can sustain as a developer so I need them in place.
• I'm not going to do it now, but I realized there's a better way I could be coding. Originally, I had been doing separate event sheets for all of the different layouts which was worse. Then I stumbled across "Include Event Sheet" and I realized very quickly how useful that could be grouping with related functions and just calling the whole event sheet as needed. 

That's pretty much it for now. One of the things on my to do list is to find a way to add nicer transition effects so my layouts don't just blink from one to the next.  I'd also like to find a way to disable certain control schemes when another is in use. I noticed the way things are now if I click to trigger an action, it registers as a click and a touch, which is no bueno. I don't know how to tell it what "state' it's in, though, except for controller which has a specific call for that.

More to come.

-P