So what’s new in the world of OML and Outwitters? Not much really. Just keeping our heads down and working through some of the boilerplate stuff. We iterated a bit on the prototype over the week for visual elements to help make the game more approachable. I got my feet wet in Google App Engine and threw together really basic asynchronous functionality into the prototype in about a day just so I have a clearer understanding of how those things are going to work. Best way to figure out how to do something is to just do it sometimes.

The next thing I’m focusing on is UI and UI tools. In Tilt to Live I had a lot of fun coding up a basic UI system that allowed for easily adding transitions on a per element basis. The problem? modifying the UI was extremely cumbersome as it required a code change and re-compile. Not to mention there was no visual aid in laying it out, so beyond just looking at jpeg mock ups in photoshop, there was a lot of trial and error in getting things lined up correctly. The “screens” are still organized as a stack. You can push new screens on top, remove then, etc. This setup makes it much easier in handling things like “going back”,  switching game state, or handling pop ups.

I’m using a similar system for Outwitters again with a few modifications. I’ve separated out the UI logic from the Screen class into a controller class for a more traditional MVC setup. So now layout data (even if it’s still c++ code) is separate from UI logic and I can edit it with reckless abandon.  This also opens the door for making the layouts data driven. I can put together a layout tool that allows me to visually layout elements on a screen and save them into some sort of format for the game to load up and attach a controller to. This by itself would really help speed up the process of creating the UI we need for the different elements in Outwitters, which is a bit more UI heavy than Tilt to Live.

Yet, I’m wanting to take it one step further and allow me to author transitions in the tool so the UI can be animated in a similar manner to how Tilt to Live’s UI worked. This would be a huge boon and allow us to create fancy-shmancy UI presentation without all the verbose function calls I previously used to achieve the same effect. I guess at this point it’s just a matter of deciding “how detailed” I want this tool to be in terms of animating the elements. There’s no way I’ll be able to achieve the fidelity of what a flash powered UI with an actual artist/animator can achieve, but hopefully it will still be better than the basic ‘powerpoint presentation’ feeling I get when I play some games.

I’ve been looking at “off-the-shelf” solutions of flash integration recently and I haven’t found anything that’s been satisfactory. Usually, there’s a huge gotcha in the free/cheap areas (incomplete implementations, or said to be buggy) and in the commercial market, it’s just too cost prohibitive for a small team to use (looking at you, ScaleForm). Yet, like many things, I won’t truly know the extent of what GameSWF can do until I give it a try. I suspect it’s using standard OpenGL, but looking around there seems to be an iphone compatible version floating around. Just briefly glancing around the net on discussions about this topic, the arguments seem to be wishy-washy. There’s mentions that it’s usable for UI, but actionscript support is spotty in a few places. Seeing that all I want is a way to animate bitmap transforms easily, and get callbacks for taps on menus, my requirements hopefully aren’t too strict. The few that have reported back on their success/failure of using gameswf seem to be stating that writing UI may require scripting, which isn’t friendly to artists. Since I’m handling a lot of the UI work, it doesn’t seem like a huge hurdle. Performance has been listed as an issue, but that was pre 3G.

In any case, I’ll be playing with gameSWF over the next couple of weeks and report back, while we continue work on game balance for Outwitters. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll continue on with my original plan of writing a custom tool for my specific UI needs. Next week is lots of playtesting, tweaking, and also fixing some Tilt to Live bugs!