Progress has been slow on Sokobanish 1.3, but it’s still going somewhere when I’m not too occupied with drawing comic pages and wallowing in self-pity. Showcased here is the new level select screen! I posted a sneak peek of this in the Lanschilandia Games news a while ago, and as I promised there, here’s a more detailed look.
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| More intelligent discourse than my usual writing. |
So, what’s new? Quite a lot, in fact, since I finally separated all this stuff from its primitive home on the old title screen. In the top-left corner, you can see the overview of level sets – this is roughly the same list as the old one, but looking quite a bit neater, framed by a sort of book shelf. Because it’s the level library. Get it? Me neither.
In place of putting in a level number, the levels are now listed as fancy soulstone spheres in the somewhat stage-like section of the screen. (Because they’re stages. Hehehe.) This not only gives you an overview of how many levels are actually in the set, but also lets me do some other neat things.
For starters, selecting them now reveals meta info! This can be set in the updated Level Creator, with the exception of the preview, which is generated automatically by rendering the level data with tiny-sized versions of the game elements. Since it shrinks the actual in-game graphics, custom tiles will also show up as they should in the preview. The level sets have meta info as well, which is simply the contents of a file named “info.txt” that can be placed in the level set folder.
You may also notice the little rune circle icon on one of my test levels – it indicates that the level has been completed. In the top-right corner are the player profiles, framed by, well, a picture frame. Selecting “<New player>” and attempting to start a level will prompt the user to enter a name, thus creating a profile for them. Huzzah!
And yes, as the good old gear button between “Play!” and “Quit” implies, the game now has an actual options dialogue with fascinating basic settings like volume controls and switching off the game’s full-screen mode. It’s funny how the need for basic GUI functionality never seemed to occur to me back in 2006, but I like to pretend I’ve gotten better with that sort of thing. Maybe.
Oh, and there’s an experimental new feature implied by the contents of the level set list. Can you guess what it is?
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