I hope you all had good Christmas!
Last week I didn’t work much on Sector Six. I was playing games, eating candy, working on my side projects. But even with that, I have managed to make spaceship building and inventory management possible with a controller!
There are two ways to approach using interfaces with the controller.
The good way:
Put clickable interface elements into some sort of grid and allow the player to select them in that grid using D-pad.
The easy way:
Keep all elements as they are and instead make mouse cursor respond to D-pad and other buttons on the controller. Instead of moving the cursor with the mouse, you use D-pad to move it. Instead of clicking on buttons with the mouse, you press buttons on the controller.
Because I don’t know how to put buttons and slots into the grid, I had to go with the easy way. It’s not very comfortable, but it works, so I guess it’s okay, at least for now. When I started working on Sector Six, I didn’t even know what controller is, so it could be worse.
Anyway, before I can say that Sector Six fully supports controllers, I still need to address several issues pause menu, game exit menu, tooltips and tutorial hints.
I believe I can resolve those issues within one day and then start fixing glitches that have piled up over time. I’m talking about minor graphical glitches in mission results interface, pause graphical glitch, several Light Eater Eashor’s glitches, and others.
Because I got really tired while making story mission V and because implementing controller support is very boring, next game update will be in January. Mission V was really challenging to make and I worked so much, that it got me dangerously close to serious burnout. I want to slow down development a bit to catch my breath before massive updates that I am going to work on in 2017!
I’m planning to write more about my plans for the next year in next echo.
Until then!