Soooo...
It's been a while since I took up Physica development for the last time. That's mostly because I've been busy with school term's end and similar stuff, which I won't go into. Still, I've been learning some useful stuff about game (and software in general) developing in the meanwhile, so I drew a plan for future developments of the game in order to make it more "standard". The idea is not to introduce big changes in the gameplay or in the game structure itself (nothing more than new levels, basically) but to make the source code more tight to coding standards. Here are my thoughts...
Standard languages implementationUp to now, data was defined through a game-specific script language, which was some kind of wheel reinvention. I plan to implement XML as the main language (via the pugixml library) and Javascript for procedural scripting (via the TinyJS library). That will probably make it easier to other people to edit stuff, and for sure will relief me of taking care of the scripting part. I've done most of this.
Gettext for translationsAgain, there's no need to reinvent the wheel. Translations should be done via gettext. Unfortunately, I haven't had time to try to implement it yet, and I'm waiting to have a running linux machine (which should happen in a couple of weeks), but that's something I will definitely implement.
SDL 2.0The release candidate should be reliable enough for me to use it. And it lets the game run faster, of course, which is definitely good (I had to run it windowed on some computers because the fullscreen mode would take too much CPU, now I should not have those problems anymore).
A fancy UI!Up to now UI was mostly static. I've managed to implement some UI animations, which look kinda nice to me (I'll post a demo video as soon as I can)
More logical version numbers This is mostly a formal detail due to my inexperience in game developing. Up to now version numers seemed a bit illogical... And no testing was made before releases considered to be stable and bug-free (again my ignorance and inexperience mostly) - I should take a more logical workflow from now on
Easier!What many people told me is that the game is damn hard. Maybe a more gentle learning slope would be better. I'll definitely add some levels to the tutorial, so that players can become more confident with controls, but I was considering to add another level pack between the current 1st pack and the tutorial...
Those things together will practically force me to rewrite the majority of the code (all in all, I'll keep only the physics simulation part), but that's OK if I can get the game to run on as many platforms as possible.
I'd like to hear thoughts about this from more experienced developers.