Last weekend I was still thinking through how I wanted to store all the map, texture, and sound assets for cut-scenes. Since then I've managed to work through the asset management, and have completed playback of the opening cut-scenes for levels in story mode. There are a few things coding-wise that I'm not entirely happy with, but cut-scene playback does now work without issue.
- I did attempt to refactor the rendering of maps into something re-usable for both the main level, and maps displayed during cut-scenes. I ran into technical issues getting the shared rendering code to work, and ultimately back-tracked to duplicating the code. Not where I want to be there for sure... The C++ 11 std::function and lambda expressions are what I struggled with a little there. I'm keeping a mental note to explore these further so that I won't struggle with it next time.
- During both game-play, and cut-scene playback, maps are fully rendered every single frame. It should be possible to instead render them to a separate texture, and just treat that fully rendered map as a sprite. Performance hasn't been an issue, given how simple this game is. But it's something I'll be keeping in mind for the future.
In other news, I am super relieved that I chose to use GitHub, and push to it regularly while developing this game. I had a catastrophic failure with my main development PC, and have been able to continue working on this game without interruption on my laptop. Phew!! ?
Ok, it's not entirely true it has been without interruption... I have a nasty habit of accidentally tapping the touchpad on this damned laptop while typing, and having the cursor reposition itself all over the place in my editor. ?
With cut-scene playback effectively in the bag, it's time to start actually crafting the opening cut-scene for story mode. Then I'll be working on adding more types of food, crafting more levels, and generally working on the actual game I want to make! I've added everything I'll be working on as Issues over on GitHub:
