I spent most of yesterday fiddling around with lots of different control methods for the Sheep Herding game. After a number of methods, I've settled on having "Come" and "Go" buttons.

Each time I release a game, the thoughts and comments come rolling in. Let's take a peek at this week's thoughts.

RSKGames

I find Flappadiddle Doo having the smooth gameplay like its predecessor and the polish found in ''Sheep Goes Right''.

Awww, the lovely lovely thick snow.

First step of adding Story Mode is to add something worth playing for. There be birds to select!!

Our second test of Flappadiddle with various improvements and tweaks and hopefully a better all-round experience.

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World 2 will be a bit leafy.

Oh, the joys of having the ability to generate your background from tiles

About time I added this in!! The scoreboard flips between Top 5 and Last 5, and once I add them in, will also show the Online Top 5, too. All in one neater space on the right, leaving the left hand side relatively uncluttered.

I went over the checklist, last night, and .. Boy, is there still a lot to do!!

It's taken quite a while to get up to this point, but I now have the engine half-doing a "Which button is pressed" function. I can push a keyboard button, or tap a button on a connected controller, and the engine says "This button!" There's a slight issue, whereby if a button is held, it takes control. For example, if you're playing on the keyboard, but your gamepad's lying on the floor, and the thumbstick is prodded to the side, then no matter what button you try to hit, it always says...

I started the rewrite of the controller code, last night. Digging deep, I realised I could probably reuse quite a lot of the old code, since the engine already grabs Joystick data each frame, as well as using a bunch of good-old fashioned numbers to do a lot of the legwork.

Spent hours (literally hours) simply planning a method in my head, that would allow me to get the controller config page to work.

A brief roundup of the things I've managed to accomplish, during 2017.

1. Online Scoreboards

It's been a long time since I last had online scoreboards in my general AGameAWeek games. iOS's GameCenter made me lazy, and I could never be bothered to implement anything more complicated into my Framework. But this year, I opted to take on the challenge, so right at the start of this year I added an "Enter Your Name" thing into my framework, and tied the scoreboard system to the server....

OK, the mouse stuff seems to be working with overscan, now, which is good. Additionally, the Game Controller code appears to be kinda ok. I've set up the engine/framework/etc to assume all controllers are "The player's input", so I'm going to be doing 1-player only stuff until I can be bothered to faff about with it some more and implement multiplayer controller code! Unfortunately, I don't 100% trust what GLFW3 is telling me. The controller input list here is suggesting that DPad Up...

Mouse, and of course, touchscreen. They both took a bit of a tumble, last night. The overscan seemed to be working, but I was only testing it with controllers, since the overscan is typically only used on Android TV versions of the games. Yesterday, however, I chose to reuse the overscan functions on iOS.

Been trying to get High-Res Screenshot mode working. It'd be nice to have 1920x1080 screenshots from the engine, but trying to get OpenGL to render to a buffer larger than the screen resolution (my laptop's only 1366x768) seems to be quite a bit trickier than I thought. At the very least, I don't think it'll be something I can support outright, and will instead attempt to get it working "for me", and warn against widespread use. Unless, by some miracle, I find a foolproof way to do it, ...

I knew something annoying would crop up. I just knew it!!

Today I've been working through what will and won't be part of the "Framework". That is, what values and settings and functions should be "Framework", which should be "Engine" and which should be "The Game".

Yesterday was full of tweaks. As I posted here, the Todo list is looking fairly complete, but this is still only the background engine for the new C++ framework.

Spent tonight going through my todolist, checking things off, and generally fixing a few things that aren't quite up to 100% yet.

I probably shouldn't, yet, but I feel that things are at a decent enough point that I can make a start on things. I still have oodles of things to add to the Engine, like proper load/save functions, and doing online URL requests for the online leaderboards. And, of course, I've still not got the new engine running on iOS, yet. That definitely needs doing!

Most folk seem to be giving me successful results with yesterday's benchmark test program. If you haven't already, Do so here!

Over on SoCoder, Rockford suggests that the reason my quad-based images are looking skewed is because they're lacking a 3D element. I guess that makes sense, but I was really hoping I could do some nice quad-based sprites, without resorting to a third dimension. Bah, humbug. As it stands, I can "kinda" warp the sprites around, but they look a bit weird when doing it.

Today's been about neatening the engine in places, and also adding a Random Number Generator.