Handling User Input Events

Mar 31, 2022

Today's goal: Add APIs to the Substratic Engine for accessing and handling user input events and then wire it up to Crash The Stack!

Updates

  • Finished the game loop implementation and abstracted it
  • Also fixed the frames-per-second counter!

Ludum Dare 50

Ludum Dare 50 starts this weekend! It starts around 4AM in my time zone (EEST).

Check out the countdown clock here: https://ldjam.com/

Here's my plan:

My plan is to stream most of my work on the game, but I might have to hack off-stream at times if streaming isn't convenient.

I'll try to stream for two 3-4 hour blocks on Saturday and Sunday if all goes well. Make sure to have notifications turned on so that you can see when I go live!

What Kind of Game?

The type of game we make ultimately depends on the final theme which will be announced when the competition starts.

However, here are some constraints I will try to follow:

  • No screen scrolling, everything has to take place on one screen
  • No sounds or music (unless I can quickly wire up something) - make it part of the concept?
  • No sprite animations, but I might animate the motion of certain game elements
  • Stick with a simple, retro pixel art style because I am not an artist!

Why so many constraints?

Since the language and game engine are still extremely new, I'm keeping things simple for myself so that I can potentially write a complete game with everything I already have.

In future events, my ambitions will scale to whatever we've built by that time!

Handling User Input

To finish up our preparation for Ludum Dare, today we're going to work on user input so that the user can actually do something in the game!

Luckily GLFW provides APIs for handling input events, so we'll wrap that using the Substratic Engine to put together something that our game code can use.

For now, the goal is to take user input events and create an event data structure so that a stream of events can be handled by the game.

We might also have to provide an API for accessing the state of individual keys, but for now I'll avoid it.

Tasks

TODO Write some C APIs that wrap GLFW's keyboard and mouse input APIs

TODO Create event data structures for keyboard and mouse events

TODO Provide an API for accessing the input event queue

TODO Wire up basic mouse and keyboard events in Crash The Stack