![]() For the beech branch example above, this produces a range of colours for the tree's branches somewhere within the following: In addition to this slightly different colouring for each individual tree, they're also offset slightly from the grid of tiles that make up the map to help break up the uniformity of where the trees are located. Each species of tree has a colour swatch for the branch and leaf layers, made up of a small number of pixels (currently 1 pixel tall and 4 pixels wide but it can be any number), looking like this for Beech trees (the large round-shaped ones in the pic above): Modding this is as simple as changing the image files above, and the game then takes a random amount from each pixel to produce a random colour in that range. You may have seen in earlier updates that the map generator was picking positions for trees so that they had enough space to grow into, but the in-game shots didn't have any trees in the world - until now! We're still planning to replace the grass/dirt floor with something better than the current random scattering You'll notice that copies of the same type of tree have slightly different coloration of the leaves and trunk/branches. I realise some of the translations are quite poor and we'll definitely be using some professional translations for the final game - this is really just a tech demo! Having developed the UI to a state I was happy with for some initial interactions, I also had time this month to move on to getting trees into the game world. Here's a video showing the results of this. Although this goes against some of the agile design principals I try to stick to with development, I both knew that I definitely wanted this in as a feature eventually, and more importantly, that it would be much more of a pain to add it in later after assuming everything is displayed in English. Although this is just the first stage of having a UI in the game, I thought it was important to get multi-language support, or internationalisation, in place to ensure that it's relatively easy to get different language translations as part of the game engine rather than trying to add it in later. Along with the colour of each button (which you can see being used in a basic transition), these can all be easily changed via mods which is a strong design goal of the game. The background to each button is a simple ninepatch. The icons used are freely available from the excellent. For now, rock walls can be designated for mining, and shortly I'll be adding similar options for marking which trees should be chopped down. ![]() ![]() September Update - From tech demo to actual game Here's a quick overview of this month's progress: there's the start of the UI to let you interact with the game world, support for translation into multiple languages, and procedurally coloured tree generation! First of all was getting a simple UI up and working, which marks the first time the player can properly interact with the game world. ![]()
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