Game dev problem solving

I've been doing more game dev lately, and these are some things I've found interesting, challenging or just discoveries I've made. I know that these are not "new" in the world of game dev, but they're something I've come across that I found notable.

UI

Haxeflixel does not have its own UI system. It is possible to incorporate HaxeUI but doing some research it does seem troublesome to get working and is not maintained well. So what I decided to do is take a page from my web-development experience and build a little component library based on frameworks like shadcn.

The components are nothing overly complicated, and they are project specific, as any UI system would be for any game. Card, Dialog, and other web-like components exist, but then there may be more game-centric components such as a LifeBar, or Selector as I call it (see below).

World Map

I have a couple game projects in the works, admittedly just to mix it up and solve different problems. One is an RPG, that has a world map like the game "Final Fantasy Tactics". In that game, when it originally came out for the PlayStation 1, a Player could navigate the world map using the d-pad as it is a node based world map, effectively a large graph. It does some really neat things when we reveal a new location (node), but what I wanted was the ability to do what the game Helldivers 2 does, with its planet maps. You can use the arrows/d-pad in the node based way and move between locations, or you can use the gamepad/mouse. With this we get a nearest neighbor graph as while we may put the mouse not on a location, but then use the d-pad, it should know what the current 4 way edges are and needs to deduce that. An example video is below:

Its a neat problem, and one that I would not encounter in my usual work.

There is more I want to write about, such as inputs (keyboard & mouse versus gamepad), but that's all for now as I want to be able to provide examples and get certain projects to certain phases before I write about them.

Thanks,

John