EverEnding DevBlog 165: Framing

Weird week, though I know I say that a lot. Took a first run at trying to work on AnxEdit concurrently with the game, which worked alright for the first couple of days, while I built out a general task list of beats to hit when I start building out the levels, but got weird once it became clear that the first thing I’d have to do was update the game to work with the new style of sliders I’d created for AnxEdit. I found myself in a position where I was just working on two separate UI programming tasks concurrently, which is pretty frustrating and unsatisfying. So, pragmatically, I’m probably going to work a bit more on AnxEdit until I find a nice stopping point, hop over to EverEnding to get the code base back up and running, and then work on coding AnxEdit and building EverEnding levels concurrently. I think this approach shows promise, as long as I make sure the two sets of tasks I’m working on are distinctly different kinds of work, because otherwise it feels like just working on the same thing with obnoxious and distracting breaks shoved in the middle.

So, that being said, progress has nevertheless been made. I finished up the registration point editor – though I still have some stuff on my wishlist for it – and I have created and am close to finishing up a frame image editor, used for loading images and setting their active draw areas for frames. It might, in retrospect, have been better to try to make this and the frame importer, a tool for taking an image and automatically splitting it into frames, the same tool – and, indeed, I may end up doing so. For now I’ll just settle on getting this working, which is probably another hour or two of work.

I also started in on creating a dedicated double slider class, since the double slider is something I use so extensively in EverEnding’s detail editor. This is kind of a pain, but the plus side is once it’s done the detail editor will probably get boiled down to like half as many lines of code as it currently uses, since so much of the special functionality I had to create for it is now getting backed into the slider classes.

It’s been a real busy week, what with all the work I’ve had to do to get the album finished (Listen! Buy! Tell yo friends!) so between that and the aforementioned difficulties with doubling up on similar tasks I feel like not as much progress has been made as could have been.  Nevertheless, I’m getting a feel for how this is going to work, and remain optimistic that once I get my tasks lined up a bit better this will be a good change. It will take a bit more effort to set up the right kind of work for myself, but I hope that by demanding a bit more of myself in these small but specific ways I can get a lot more done.