Game Art

Fonts

Fonts are essential part of a game. Fonts gives the player a certain feel and mood of the game. There are some points to take when designing a font(especially for games):

easy to read.
visible in all sort of background imaginable.
consistent throughout the whole game.

Hence, HoverEX uses some basic design for it’s fonts.

Black Borders.
White Fill.
Regular/Bold.
Blocky text(basically Arial styled font).

TODO: Upload fonts here.

GUI

Instead of hardcoding every GUI components by code, HoverEX used ClanLib feature to read GUI design data from external XML File.

This file define the placement, attributes and hierarchy of GUI components. The GUI definition format looks a lot like the ClanLib resource manager format, so if you’re familiar with that, you should easily get acquainted with the GUI definition format. GUI files do not have sections. Instead, components can contain child-components within a tag, simply function as “sections”. This means that the hierarchical structure of the GUI is directly readable from the GUI definition file.

Naming Convention

GUI components’ naming convention is very important in HoverEX GUI File as they are the one that tell the programs how to draw a GUI component.

HoverEX Naming Convention Reference

GUI Component	Prefix
gui_	Page
win_	Window
frm_	Frame
lbl_	Label
cmd_	Button
opt_	Option (Radio Button)
txt_	Input Box
scr_	Scroll Bar
img_	Image

GUI Intraface

Component

Frame

<frame name="frame_name" x="0" y="0" width="800" height="600" surface="resource_name" mode="center"></frame>

Mode:

null
stretch
center
tile
pixmap

resource image dimension that is smaller than the frame dimension will automatically fall to tile mode
resource image dimension that is bigger than the frame dimension will not be auto stretch