Game Progress and Design Help

A note for those interested in helping with some design stuff, check after the break.

This weekend has been pretty great for me in terms of getting stuff done. The new screen manager is finally working. While it doesn't behave too differently from before, it now supports the independent nature of the individual screens and doesn't rely on complex coordination with separate managers in order to function. It also has support for simple transitions like pan or fade outs between screens, but I'm not sure how I'd want to use such a feature yet. I'd show a screen shot but the current state of screens is quite underwhelming. Those will come soon.

Buttons are now up to spec and have shed the unnecessary complexities from before. I now use a single button class which can be attached to special flash object and function uniformly. I still need to revise more complex button code such as drag and drop, but it should be drastically simpler than it was before.

Basic keyboard handling is in. While I've realized that there's a bit of work to get context sensitive keyboard navigation on screens, I can at least use the keys for run-time debugging commands.

I know this has been a long coming feature, but I got the framework for loading and saving outlined. I've explored my options and I'm going with using the local shared object system that most other flash games use. The trouble ahead comes in the method that I need to serialize the data back and forth between the saves and loads. Basically, I need to break down the various forms of save-able data into templates that can be interpreted back and forth. While it would have been easier to directly cut and past the Game State directly between loads/saves, I would run into the issue of version mismatches and incompatible saves whenever I update the game. This is the main reason I put off adding this feature for so long, but with some ideas I've gotten from work, I believe I can tackle this one competently.

I needed some help figuring out design issues which I go into detail with after the break...


Lastly, I'm taking my time in figuring out major design issues. I'm concerned with how I'm going to handle the new Farm Screen. While the idea is to make it the information front page, I'm still trying to figure out how to best deliver the exposition of daily information and cow girl activities. Essentially, I have about 4 or 5 things that the player can look at in the beginning of the day. I want there to be a weather report, town news (store sales, holidays), cow girl growth change summary, emergency notices (Food low, Cow girl sick) etc.

I was thinking of making a list of news feed icons that would show up on the screen that the player can click on that pulls up a scroll-able dialog box detailing the relevant information. I'm OK with this idea, but I think there could be better way to do this, especially in terms of layout and user interfaces design. If anyone knows of any good interfaces from other games that deal with this sort of stuff, send them my way as my mind is drawing blanks for sources of inspiration.

The other main issue is how I plan to deal with activity exposition. Currently, ending a shift will provide a dialog box that explains the scenario of each cow girl, one by one. This requires excessive clicking with often repetitive information. This maybe especially lengthy now as I plan to remove the numerous shifts and allow for multiple activities to be preformed in one day. I could stick in a skip button, but there must be a more graceful way to do this that still interests the player in these short little bits of story.

I hope this design problems weren't explained too vaguely , but I'll be stuck on these screens until I figure out how I want to handle this. This post has been REALLY long, so thanks for reading.