The Front End

My time the past two weeks has been adding the code and menus for scenarios, in game goals, custom map setup, achievements, and winning/losing conditions. Part of me really dislikes making and laying out user interfaces – it takes quite a bit of iteration for nice layouts and a bunch of code that is tedious to write but unfortunately is unique to each menu. I suppose not every part of game development is always fun.



Building menus doesn’t give me much to talk about or show visually. But since images are better than walls of text, here’s an image of the new menu for picking scenarios. This menu is still changing, and these scenarios are just for testing and may not end up in the final game. But it will give you an idea of what I’ve been working on.



Scenarios are just one type of way to play the game. There’s also sand-box mode, with or without user defined goals, user selection of map sizes, difficulty, and terrain type. There are also plenty of achievements being added that players can work toward. I’m also trying to figure out details for a few tutorial scenarios that will introduce the game to new players.



Like most games, I’m way over my expected time budget, but I think the extra work on the game is worth it. Regardless, it’s a nice feeling to have a pretty stable build and be working on things near the bottom of my to-do list. It feels like the end of work on the game is in sight – whether or not that’s true.



It reminds me of one of my favorite programming quotes. “The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”



I wish it wasn’t true, but it is.