Dev Update 2016-09-09

The art for the endless mode I mentioned in the previous blog post has come in, and you can see it in the image below:

I've been having some issues with the UI systems in Flashcard Clash, and I was expecting to go in and fix them after the alpha release, but supporting different screen sizes has brought this all to a head. The main issue is that a snapping the ui to pixels will make animations less fluid, so things like windows sliding in and out not look as nice.

My plan with supporting different screen sizes is to make a virtual screen of about 640x480 pixels and approximate the actual screen to it. This should make UIs a bit easier to universally layout rather than having to work with the native pixels that could be anyhting between 640 to 4000.

After spending a day or so converting to floating point for the UI, and another day or so trying to make it not look too blurry when compared to pixel perfect coordinates, I started on supporting resoultion changes whilst the game is still running. The UI system was quite easy to update, I just trigger another reflow and the elements correct themselves, but I also had to rerender the SVGs so they are the correct scale for the new screen size. I still need more work to have the Spine model support changing the underlying texture, but that is in third party code that I don't want to deal with so ill postpone that as long as possible.

I don't think there's anything left in the game to do before the first public alpha test, just cleaning up the site and making sure things make sense for new users.