No Game Engine Game Dev: Word Sleuth 062:

Streamed on 2024-10-08 (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscouragerofhesitancy)

Game Engines are for sissies!

Today we picked up where we left off yesterday with the Notebooks. With a little bit of playing I made it so the Notebooks are clickable with a reasonable level of fidelity. With a left click the game switches to that set of deductions and a right click copies the current Notebook into the clicked one, then switches to the clicked Notebook.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle about parent/child relationships when animating the Notebooks flying up off the table and then dropping back on. As a result I cleaned up that code a bit so there is only one right way to create that relationship. Then I made it a bit more flexible so I could handle as many children as needed (the Bookshelf has a lot of parts) instead of the fixed number that I started with. Once that was sorted out the Notebooks animated just fine and the Bookshelf was back to drawing correctly.

Then I needed a way to indicate which Notebook was the active one. It took a few minutes to generate an "open" Notebook image and get those images through the asset pipeline, but that came together pretty quick. With the time remaining I added a pen that rests on the active Notebook and bounces to the next one. I think the visual is helpful for eye tracking the indicated changes.