šŸž + šŸ› ļø in Alchemy

When we last left our heroes, youā€™ll remember that I had just put together the barebones of an interface to view characters within the game. Left to my own devices, I had scribbled together some wood grain to match Eileenā€™s, and quickly became quite exhausted from the effort.

Remember?

I didnā€™t update last week, but Kevin and I worked on plugging in this monster to the rest of the game. Most of our sorrows come from trying to get our Inky scripting language scenes to talk to our Phaser.js code. And yes, our own human failures. This week, I worked on the actually adding characters to this interface.

It seems like Iā€™m always trying to make rows and columns of things, no matter where or what Iā€™m coding.

Those magic number are necessary, because youā€™ve got to start somewhere, kids. The result:

You may notice the interface currently features *one* character ā€“ but thatā€™s okay! It works! And when we have the other 19 sprites, itā€™s going to be a really easy switch. So far, Iā€™ve gotten it working so that the right hand box updates with character info when you clickā€¦ but Iā€™m not very happy about the interface. It is presently functionalā€¦ but lacks charm. Iā€™m hoping 19 additional character sprites will help out with that, but I might try to add a little something extra to the interactions (if thereā€™s time).

The final thing I finished today was having the interface react to what is known in other parts of the game. Basically, if the main character shares a particular piece of personally identifiable information, I update this interface by greying out characters who do not share that characteristic. Itā€™s sort of a view into what the world of the game knows about who Franklin is. Hereā€™s what it looks like when Franklin / the player has shared his birthday with the powers that be:

The showcase is fast upon our heels, and weā€™ve got lists on lists on lists. Look how playful I am on Slack:

We have a hackathon-style weekend planned next week, and Iā€™m hoping to start each day with a 20 minute phone call to have each of us go around and state what weā€™d like to get done that day, with check-in phone calls every 3 hours. Isnā€™t remote work fun??