Start Screen, Map Builder, Flowers!

I really feel like the game is starting to progress now, and there's lots of new screens today.

First up: New start screen. As you can see, the menu item backgrounds are supposed to be little islands, as is the game name. I knocked this together using Game Maker's room editor. It's only a first draft, and I'm wondering if one day in the future I might find the time to have it randomly generate the start screen islands that are dotted around. I could even get some animals moving around on them or whatever.

Next, the map builder! It's got a long long way to go but I'm pretty happy with the general gist of how this works. Generate New Map builds a map using the current settings (listed below). Customise settings lets you edit those settings. Default/Random settings work as you would expect. Generate Random Map ignores the current settings and builds a map at random. Later, I intend for this feature not to show which settings have been used, so it's a mystery map, except for the preview. I'd also like options from the start menu which let you play a map with default settings or random settings, but without previewing, so exploring will be more fun.

The poor island generation algorithm is all too obvious when viewing the full map, but there's new code on the way for that. I don't want the preview to ultimately show all the creatures etc on the map, I may restrict it to only the island shapes, or perhaps some basic terrain such as trees and rocks. Lots of work to do here.

Finally, I've added flowers, and a little selection box. The flowers don't have any use yet but can be picked up. They add a bit of colour to the world, but at the moment the single sprite for them looks a bit repetitive, I might knock up a couple of other flower arrangements. The selection box, seen here to the left of the player, shows which object you are intending to interact with. I found while scrolling the list of nearby objects, it wasn't clear which you were selecting, so now it shows you on the map.

Next job: prioritising the objects on the list. I want to make dangerous monsters (i.e. lions) appear at the top, and then the rest should appear in some order based on your direction. At the moment it builds it using a double for loop, which means the top left object always appears at the top, but I'd like it to sort them more sensibly (e.g. near squares first).