Bugs and Options

This week has been a combination of extending the UI and continuing the debugging.

As a team we started using Lua Glider as our main development platform for working on our game.  I had installed a demo version of Corona Project Manager – which is now known as Outlaw – and worked with it for a short while.  I just liked Lua Glider better.

Lua Glider has a lot of hooks into our project tools:

·         Works with Corona SDK

·         Provides debug capability with the ability to set breakpoints with Corona SDK

·         Works with both Subversion and Git

·         Works with Bugzilla and JIRA (no plug in that I can find for Mantis BT)

So it’s been a week of tracking down and taking care of bugs using Glider.

The more interesting part of the week has been adding an options menu to the game.

If you tap twice on the of part of Flights of Fancy (note the elipse around the word) – and then click the Play button:

You get this menu screen.

Set Auto Fire – this button either turns it on or off.  It does a read/write to a save state JSON file.  Code has been added to the scenes to utilize this - and I've found a couple of 'features'...

First one - I've not commented out the tap listeners in the scenes.  So you can double the fire rate by allowing the autofire to go, and them supliment the rate of fire by tapping like mad.

Second 'feature' - in scene 3 where there are multiple enemy planes - the shots coming from the player can show two bullets side by side.  Nice!  Just need to be able to replicate it as a feature later on!

Change Side – this button changes the side that you picked – so if you started working for the  Allies you now work with the Axis powers and shoot down your former buddies.  Again, does a read/write to the same JSON file.

After selecting either of these buttons you go back to the main menu screen.

Do Intro – this button allows you to redo the intro/training missions.  Once pressed you go immediately to the first scene of the intro.

Scene List – this one took a bit of time to get in.  Clicking this button displays another screen:

 

This screen uses a Corona Widget table view object.  It’s a bit cranky, but when it works it opens up the scene that gets picked from the displayed list. 

I'm going to write another post on an issue I ran into using this object.