*** it's actually been 1.5 months since i started the engine, the extra half-month was spent fixing a bunch of bugs with the engine, cleaning up the code a little and displaying some more user-friendly error messages.
this month (or, the remainder of this month plus the first 10 days of September) will be dedicated entirely to the editor! (im excited for this part. engines ive done but native interfaces are still a whole new minefield to traverse for me)
we're still using GameMaker as the notsosubtle inspiration for this, so the interfaces we're gonna start out with will bear a striking resemblance to pre-studio-era GameMaker but my argument to that is that loads of good ideas have started out as clones followed by a series of wouldn't it be cool if's. (my favourite game ever started out the same way.)
this month, the goal is to arrive at a pretty solid starting point. something that barely functions, but functions nonthetneless. here's what i want it to look like:
a concept mock-up for the visual editor, displaying a room-editor tab.
immediately, you can derive two pieces of info from this mockup:
- im not good at mockups
- its literally GameMaker but.. something's different
a couple of things are different lets unpack this. GM imo has a few but very potent frustration-machines, and this mockup proves that at least one can be eliminated: GM's weird window system!
a screencapture of gamemaker's window system, which is fine but... uhh
i have no idea who actually enjoys this system but i respectfully disagree. when youre in the midst of making something, it can get out of control pretty fast (at least from my own experience). visual noise is actually pretty good to have sometimes, especially in creative spaces (unintuitively, you wanna avoid clear space clear mind), but not so much when it can potentially stomp all momentum by unwillingly swapping yourself from salvador dali beast mode or whatever to everything being buried under a hundred windows looking like a windows xp crash askin urself "ok what the heck was i doing where am i"
so, tab system! it's all tabbed. every specialised editor dialog will be held in a tab, kinda like most code editors. people are pretty used to things like google chrome, but not so much for the idea of a bunch of windows open at once.
other changes will be a lot more evident when the program's really being used, but more on that another time when i work out what those changes actually are. pretty substanceless post this week,
thanks for bearing through it just letting you know where this project's at.
thanks for reading!