Hello again folks,

This week was pretty productive. I was able to achieve pretty much everything I wanted to get done more or less. The big thing is now the game has an actual proper title screen and some settings menus. Phases 1 and 2 are essentially complete, though still not quite where I want them and there are still some bugs/quirks I need to work out.

You often hear that folks hate programming menus and I get it, but I kind of enjoy it. I find that, for better or worse, with menu programming it’s a lot easier to brute force and end up with something that works totally fine without causing a massive performance hit. In my day job (when I had one), I was building a lot of custom tools for the team. These tools were only going to be used by me and my coworker, so they really just had to work and that’s it. That’s kind of how I feel about menu programming, just make it work.

One of my pet peeves that I’ve seen in SO many games is making menus that don’t wrap. Like when you’re at the top of the menu and press “up” it doesn’t take you to the bottom. I never understood why you would do that. It might sound silly, but it always annoys me when I come across a game that’s like that. So, obviously, all my menus wrap.

Speaking of the title screen, it also has MUSIC.

The music was written in FamiTracker which I've used a ton. Unfortunately it seems that support/dev for it stopped a few years ago and now even it's wiki is down. It's a shame because it's such a cool thing. There does seem to be one active variant of it, but that has a different UI so I didn't want to try it yet. Anyway… For those that don't know, FamiTracker emulates the sound hardware of the original NES. But what I really like about it is the Konami VRC7 module whose actual hardware was only used in a RPG called “Lagrange Point”. It has an interesting sound and is super easy to use. I will be using it for all the music going forward. 

I figure I’ll probably have just one song that plays throughout the whole of the fight. I’m considering one for each phase. Probably a variant, but that’s so much work on top of making everything else and I want this game to actually get finished. I have a piece that I wrote close to a decade ago that I think will work and I’ve already been arranging in Famitracker. The problem is I hate the melody I wrote all those years ago and have had a hard time coming up with something new. But that’s my goal for this week.

I’m going to keep it short for this update. I have a lot of work that still needs to get done, but I also just want to take the weekend off. Feel free to download the latest build and tell me what you think.