Scene transitions & Loading screen

What's new?

Well as the title suggests I worked on the transition when swapping scenes. It is still just a black fade-in fade-out effect, but it does its job well. In fact even better now because I refactored the transition logic out of my Sleep "service" and made it modular. The way I programmed this effect, which affects the whole screen, I can easily use this now as a template for some fancy new screen effects in the future. I am thinking of screen "shakes", white screen flashes and alike.

Also, I was working on the visuals of the loading screen. Afterall I made it so I have a propper scene just for traversing between scenes and so I can fully benefit of the architecture's functionalities. The way my loading screen looks like now is likely to change somewhen down the road-plan, but I think my addition is going to stay at least. Now, when loading a scene takes more than a second, you will be able to see Acey, Bixxie and Tracey. Three little slimes just trying to move on one place. You can see the animation below:

Appearantly I cannot use GIF files in a way so that you can see a little animation. So here is just the picture of the three slimes instead:

Pretty boring if they don't move, but at least you have an idea.

What's next?

Looking at the road-plan and checking the start date of the "real" project, I will be working on the save and load system and I will be one week over my schedule. Also, I didn't manage to work on this project this week as much as I would like to. On the bright sight I have 2 weeks vacation and I would be more than happy to work on this project as a hobby.

Retrospective

With this weekend I should be finished with the first phase of my road-plan. But frankly, I am missing a week for my save and load system, so this is worrying. It is also a little frustrating to see the new maps with nothing to fill them. There are tons of glitches, very few minor new bugs and I even irreversibaly changed the coal box in a way which maybe makes filling up boxes in the future tideous. But on the bright sight of things, the features I planned are implemented. Except for the save and load system, but I am very confident, that I will be able to implement them faster, due to the fact that I have no work for 2 weeks. I also bought myself the animal animations for the character sheets. Theoretically, I should have bought stuff when I decide to really do a business here and rework the graphics, but over time I really started to like the animal character and the animation sets were on sale, so might as well just grab it for cheap and have decent animations to work with. And lastly, but most importantly, I see the world and the things I implemented now with confident and reliefed eyes, because I know that the things that are there are robust. Maps can be worked at efficiently, tiles can be mapped in truth tables appropriately, scenes have a decent structure and I even reworked the SpriteBatchService (The heart and core service for my game, which is responsible for all visuals of the game.) to be more flexbible AND more efficient. The upcoming 5 weeks are planned to deal with "fundamental systems" such as sound, controller support and a major entity refactor for collisions, movement and scalability. Which means that frustrating feeling of having no "life" in the game will continue on, but at least I know about that and I should remind myself to rather keep track of what's implemented and what not. Because all the fun will be coming sooner or later.