Well although I haven't been posting much. I'm not a great poster person. I have been up to a great deal of stuff.
For starters I've continued to work on Whirligig improving and fixing where I can. A couple of things have changed including an ability to have an ini file with the video file with all the settings allowing people to give out there films with accompanying ini file and people can play without having to setup. I've also included a volume control while in the player with hot keys '-' and '='. This is only a temporary change and any new videos loaded will be set to full volume again. It does however give some control where before there was none.
So where has a large part of my effort been put into then. Well I've started working on making Whirligig double as an adventure game creator. "You're crazy" I hear you cry. "Down that way only madness lies". Well I am doing this for a couple of reasons. One I want to make an adventure game, I've been working on it for a while and this is a good opportunity to do so and two although people like Whirligig and find it useful it is a small fish in a big pond. Before long there will be better featured players with more options and that will also run faster. Whirligig will continue to be a player but one of the major elements I've created it for is customisability. I don't think any other player has or will have such an ability to customise and ease in which to do so (with the publisher). By making a game I will have an ability to extend all these options, add to the wide range of setting that are already available and also make something unique and entertaining. I also want to allow people to do the same and as I'm extending the publisher all these new features will become available to people.
So what's happened so far. Well I've been working on the different locations for the game, many of which are used in this website. I've added an inventory system so you can pick up objects and I've added a niffty if then system that allows you to interact these objects with other objects. The system I've come up with envolves the powerful "hotspot" with a none, key, lock, switch option. Once I've got it in there properly I'll be releasing it with some explanation videos. The next step is to add a 'save' option which I hope to do this week.
So the next version of Whirligig and publisher will include:
- An inventory system.
- A Save option.
- An if,then, do system (I will explain this in full when I release).
- A positional audio system. All hotspots will be able to have audio attached coming from the position they are set.
- A next video option so that once one video finishes the next begins(great for cut scenes).
All new options will be available and editable in the publisher and compatible in the player. The player will also work in the same way as it always does as well and improvements will be made as time goes on.
I hope people are going to be interested in this. I'm going to do it anyway regardless. I might also do a kick starter to be able to work on it full time. If you're interested and have ideas that you might want to see, let me know. Other than that, watch this space :)