ebiten

Progress on My Ebiten Game Made in Two Months

Jacob Salmela

Feb 10, 2022 • 3 min read

Pictures speak volumes, so I'll add those and little captions to each one.

I was able to get a new screen drawn when a user clicked on a planet. I added some asteroids, but as you can see, the animations were not working.

I did get the animations to settle, but they were still choppy.

More experimenting with drawing the sprites.

Then, I got stuck in a giant rabbit hole of trying to animate things in a standard way.

Frames here were drawn, but in a row. And the ships didn't get drawn at all.

Every time I made a change I thought would work would have problematic effects elsewhere.

Finally, I started a giant revamp of my code. I had no convergence or standard on three things:

resolv.Objects
Sprite animations
My custom types

So after a few days, I converged things and it seems to be working better. I have slices of all my objects, such as:

[]*Planet
[]*Star
[]*Ship
[]*Button

These custom types all have a resolv.Object, which is what I'm using for placing elements, and eventually collisions and the like.

I also spend considerable time getting some code in place to detect the screen size and then making a galaxy twice the size of that. Since this will be a mobile game, I needed to plug in some code with cgo, which was quite an experience. In any case, I can detect that now for iOS and adjust accordingly. My desktop version is also much larger.

On top of that, I was able to add some User Interface buttons, which I will be tying in to actions.

A large galaxy with all my debug info enabled

The beginnings of my user interface. A present on the top-left. Some currency at the top-right. Galaxy and System view buttons on the bottom-right. And finally, some ship buttons in the bottom-middle since your ships may be in different edges of the galaxy.

Follow my channel for more updates and to watch me code in real time.

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