Archive for January, 2011

When Lumi was being designed, I wanted to make the navigation through the level packs and levels as slick as possible. I had played enough iOS games to know that navigation makes a huge difference to a games impact on a player. We were aiming for a simple, almost obvious paradigm to allow players to navigate through the level packs and levels.
I realised that during the discussions, the word ‘pages’ was constantly mentioned, as in ‘when the player goes from this page to this page’ or ‘maybe we should let the player flip through pages of levels’… this was so obvious – we were even using it while discussing WHAT the navigation would be. So, pages it was. With that out of the way, I decided to go with a UI mechanism similar to what Angry Birds had done for their level selection mechanics, which was to allow the user to slide left/right to flip ‘pages’.

Initially I had the code doing the same thing (sliding left and right), and that worked really well, but after I saw the graphic assets and we discussed how the level pack graphics would look, I realised I had to move to an up/down sliding mechanism. Not a problem, a quick refactor, a new enumeration and voila!

So now that Lumi has been released, and is doing well, I thought I’d share the code behind Lumi’s sliding menu system.

WARNING! LOTS OF CODE COMING NOW…

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