I already wasted my “I need to stop coming up with titles title” over a year ago. (I’m assuming I only get one of those, although the person who actually looks at this blog the most is me, so I can do what I want I guess). Nearly every post I want to call that, but instead I have to think of something creative. Bah. Creativity.

I’ve been working on UI stuff recently. I hate UI design. That and level design. Really any design. Programming is the part of this whole thing I actually enjoy, I just do the rest for fun something to do to please the gods of the underworld because I kind of have to to make a game out of my code. I’ve decided (for now, this will change at least 12 times before anyone sees it) that the game should be presented as a screen on a virtual console that commands the player’s ship. This is mainly just because it lets me get away with a much simpler (for simpler, read “less requiring of any level of artistic skill”) interface, but also it might look kind of neat. Maybe? Who knows…

I experimented a bit with that and worked out that it is remarkably easy to do in Unity. Just set a camera to output to a RenderTexture and then make that the material on a quad and boom! You have a virtual screen. Getting inputs to work correctly with it is a bit more complicated and something I haven’t tried yet, but knowing my ideas are actually possible gives me some hope with this whole project.

I’ve also started messing around with a few basic interfaces, such as a panel to tell players what their ship is currently targeting. For the nth time I am running into my old issue of spending a lot of time trying to work out how to make a nice, fancy, generalized system to do something when that is entirely unnecessary. Struggling with this leads me to making some very bizarre notes around my work space:

After spending about ten minutes working on problems like that my brain goes “I don’t want to do this anymore” and opens up Hearts of Iron 4, because world conquest is a lot more enjoyable than designing control systems for fictional spaceships apparently. Computer programming really isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.