Hi folks,
I hope you are all enjoying your weekend like I am! I went on a weekend off to relax a bit and recharge my batteries. I have been working a lot and it's not going to stop so a relaxing weekend off will be healthy for me.
During this week, I worked on one thing and one thing only. Making a game with two genres and one theme. This is a huge feature, because it covers almost all aspects of City Game Studio. Starting with game creation, of course, but also game ports, remakes, games of the year, contracts, updates, DLCs...
Since it involves so many aspects of City Game Studio, it involves more work up front, thinking about how to do things so that it works well both in terms of the code, but also in terms of the interface. Currently, when you create a game, there is only one genre, and therefore only one texture to display. Being able to combine genres means that there are two textures to be displayed where there was only one originally, so it affects almost every interface in City Game Studio.
But it doesn't stop at aesthetics. Data also needs to be revised, where a simple game_genre field was enough, now it becomes an array. That's more things to change in the code so that everything connects well.
Besides all this, I want to make the old saves compatible with the new version of the game. I don't want the game to support two save formats, it would hurt the frame rate. Instead, I prefer writing a migration script to convert your savegame to make it compatible with the new version of the game.
As you can see, only one feature, but it's a big job.
I hope to finish all this next week to tell you more about it.
Until then, have a great weekend.
Xavier aka Binogure