No Game Engine Game Dev: Word Sleuth 098: Switching between Chalkboard Doodads

Streamed on 2024-12-11 (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscouragerofhesitancy)

Game Engines are for sissies!

There are now five Chalkboard doodads. My original plan was to randomly select one and start it each time you start a new game, but I have changed my mind. Instead, we are going to start with none of them active, then you can choose one to start. You will also be able to stop the running one.

To accomplish this, I moved some of Doodad tracking out of GameContext and into GameScene. I made a piece of chalk and a chalk eraser and some chalk "buttons" to click on. Clicking on the chalk brings up the chalk "buttons", where each one has a logo indicating which doodad it represents. Clicking one of them will hide the menu and load the indicated doodad. Clicking the eraser either hides the menu or stops the current doodad.

The last piece was to make the doodads re-loadable so when you load one that you had already interacted with, it still loads in a good state. This was just moving a bit of code around from where things were initialized into the part that turns the doodad on. And that is the end of doodad work!

There was enough time left to tackle a couple of easy loose ends. I added a check to the surrender function to see if any guesses had been made. If not, it doesn't reveal the answer and is slightly more insulting. Lastly, switching between Notebooks feels bad if you click too fast; the pen can desync from the notebooks and pop. So I suppress the Notebook clicking actions while the pen is flying around or the Notebooks themselves open/close. It feels much better.