ebiten

Ebiten Space Game Progress Continues...

Jacob Salmela

Feb 16, 2022 • 2 min read

I'm still hooked on Ebiten for 2D games. My game is progressing and the code is becoming more maintainable, which is my real goal--so I can quickly scale, fix, or enhance the game.

My latest struggle was with ebitenui, which is a framework for creating User Interfaces (UIs) with Ebiten. It's still early in it's development, but the demo shown on the repo definitely has the potential and it seems to have a lot of followers.

However, I found the library extremely challening to implement. This GIF below shows my struggles well.

Trying to lay out these buttons was very challenging.

You have to essentially create containers for the buttons, but laying them out is difficult if it's not in a menu-like format. So I ended up adding colors so I could see where the containers were and then trying to shuffle the buttons around.

After a lot of tweaking, I got it working in a minimum way. I hooked it up to my Ship object and it gets highlighted when you click the button, which is cool.

Clicking the bottom-left button hightlights my ship, but the selector icon is too big, as you can see.

Also, it doesn't de-select when I click another ship, but that's all just logic for my go code and not related to ebiten or the library.

I'm still streaming my progress on Twitch so feel free to follow me if you want to watch as the game continues to be developed.

If you're curious to see what others have built using Ebiten, I suggest checking out this collection in Itch.io:

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