so it's been a while. i've been doing other stuff, got dragged into a game jam and my son went off to college. a few months ago i played my game on midi drums and it constantly crashed - i had only tested on the keyboard since rewriting the gameplay using an ECS. So i shelved it.
i didn't need to use a component system, things worked great before, but the intent of this project was to learn so that's what i'm doing. i'm trying different ways of doing the same thing to better understand programming. so anyway, i decided to fix it a couple of weeks ago and then i rewrote the Song Menu as a component system also, which ofcourse broke a lot of things but i got new things added. i also refined a lot of transitions, animations and flow.
here are some highlites (i might make a vlog entry later)
the loading screen now transitions smoothly into this quiet landing screen, instead of immediatly selecting the first song. I had to clean up a lot of code for this simple thing to happen. that should probably say "to make some Noice!" instead of rock out.
the selection screen now has ABC indicators for the columns, and songs group better (example: number songs now sort in the same column "#").
also, there is a heads up song list with song counter. this was really tricky because it has to work going sideways column to column, and also when jumping from A-Z and Z-A. All movement is animated now so navigation doesn't just teleport to location. going from A-Z animates off the screen and back in from the opposite side so it feels like it wraps around. it all looks kinda the same but i put a lot of work into it.
and this right here is the reason i redid the menu. now when you select a song on the song screen, there is count of the other songs by the same artists. for the beatles there are 71 songs.
so from there you can play the song or go into this next menu. which is the feature i really wanted but brought up the programmatic problem of what happens when i select a song from here? does it play the song, or does it show it in the previous screen? how do i update the previous screen? anyway, the solutions i had to find the cover art position and update all the info on the selection screen were comboluted so i rewrote the menu and now when you select a song on this list, the corvers in the background animate to the corresponding position and this screen transitions to the previous menu screen with the new selection showing. when you get out that screen it transitions smoothly back to the song selection.
i left the covers faintly visible in the backround as a visual cue for orienation.
lastly, i added a couple of little animated "reactors" for the drum bass.
a lot of other stuff got fixed and broken along the way. but this post is already too long. the menu changes broke the sorting options which i will fix next. but now what happens when songs are sorted by artist? the new song list becomes redundant. or does it want to become other options, like same genre? or do i hide the option when sorted by artist. anyway.
