So I missed a whole week this time. But I have an excuse, or even a pair of them! First, I’ve been working on the new menus’ UI all this time, and now it’s nearly finished, though a few rough spots remain here and there, mainly due to gamepad support being somewhat inconsistent. The new controls menu with support for gamepad and (in future) touch controls also took some time to get right.

Another excuse is, Wasteland 2 came out. And it’s good. No, it’s not astonishing, and it probably will never achieve such cult status as Fallout did, but it’s quite enjoyable once you get past the brutality of first-levels combat, and so I spend some of my free time playing it instead of coding.

Here’s a screenshot of the new menu UI. It’s quite similar to mock-ups that I posted before, no big surprises here, but it’s an actual, in-game screenshot, just to document progress I’m making.

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I missed the Monday with a weekly update, didn’t I? Also, most of the rest of the week. Not that I’m really on a tight schedule here, since I guess I have about two regular readers. But it’ a slippery slope, which ends with only writing to this blog two times a year, and I’m hoping to avoid it. So, here’s the latest news.

We’ve made some more progress on UI, and now have a final variant. I’m now waiting for Oleg to create a texture atlas out of it, so I can finally begin programming.

Since there wasn’t much to do on coding front last week, I concentrated on two thing: making Return of Dr Destructo easier to compile and checking out a new feature of Emscripten called Asyncify.

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In this weekly update, I would like to talk about game’s difficulty, options and UI.

The modern notion is that game’s options should be as simple as possible. It is even preferable if a game has no options at all, which is often the case for browser and mobile games. While I see some validity in this point of view, I simply can’t embrace it. For me, exploring various menus, ways of tweaking a game, was always a pleasant part of experience, especially when it comes to difficulty options.
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