An update on the UI work

This is the menu redesign I’m working on. I don’t have anything to release yet because I want to save it until it’s definitely an improvement on what’s already there.

new_menus

You can see with Cast Loosen there’s a sub menu for the target. I tried out exposing all the arouse/heavy arouse (options #1 and #2) variations in a sub menu, but picking the variation isn’t an interesting decision so I’m going to keep that randomised.

I’m hiding the descriptions inside a foldable section. I figure those are things you really only need to read once. Maybe I’ll default them to unfolded if you’ve never seen an action before, or if you’re on a big display. I haven’t decided which.

Does anyone have recommendations for JS animation libraries? I need relatively simple tweening through a list of keyframes for a variety of CSS properties. Preferably something that runs OK on underpowered devices. JQuery is disappointingly bloated and sluggish.

Using pickle for game saving, 7 months on

This post isn’t much use for anyone but programmers: it’s about the save format I’ve chosen, and a big overview of how it’s been working out for me.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, rather than packing my data into a special format for saving, I just feed my game objects directly into python pickle. Most Python folks regard this with horror!

The drawbacks haven’t exactly been the ones that everyone warns about. Most people I’ve talked to consider that doing this makes it infeasible to change the data format while retaining backward compatibility. In fact, it was pretty quick to set up a data migration system that overrides bits of pickle deserialisation and runs special migration scripts based on a version number stored inside the object.

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