Now that Goblin Rules Football has a steam page up, I’m starting to “fine tune” what is in the game currently instead of just adding random content.
The first thing I wanted to do was to make it so all of my UI is navigable with a game pad. The in-game UI worked well with a game pad, but the title screen UI was a mess and very game pad unfriendly. It took a while to get work and some custom scripting on the UI elements to make it easier for game pads (automatically update the new “selected” selectable, dynamic navigation stuff, getting out of input fields with a d-pad, etc.), but it seems to work now. The only thing that can’t be done with a game pad is enter into the text fields, which ask for things like length of halves and the lobby name. For the most part, everything works!
Fixed a few minor glitches in the game, such as goblins still “running” after a touchdown was scored even though the goblin isn’t moving any more. Made it so the UI markers for things like Q/E passing update to the game pad icons when the player selects to use the game pad UI in game, and vice versa to switch to the keyboard markers when that option is unchecked.
The other thing I did was to add a “was punched” indicator to each goblin. When a goblin is punched in the game, they take damage but they are also “slowed down” for a few seconds. To indicate this to the player, the goblin sprite flashes red and white. That flash only happens once, though, so it requires the player to remember how long ago they were last punched. Additionally, if the player switches to a new goblin that was just punched, they may not have seen the sprite flash on their new goblin that is now “slowed.” That’s actually why I originally wanted to add a new visual indicator. While testing other things I noticed my goblin was really slow and I couldn’t tell what the slow down was, but I suspected it was the wasPunched slow down. So, I added this band aid visual indicator (shown next to the fatigue indicator for reference) for whenever the goblin is slowed down by a recent punch.
It looks..fine? You can almost tell it’s a band aid. At least it is something though to send a signal to the player. Hopefully it works well!
Next Steps…
More clean up, more testing, and eventually switching to the Steamworks multiplayer. I think I might need to update my “End of 2022” release date on the Steam page soon…
Smell ya later, nerds!