Discarding chits
It’s hard to see from the gif, but I am clicking the left Ctrl key to enable discarding. As long as Ctrl is held down, a red cross appears below the cursor.
Had to rework input handling a bit to get this one working. The result is that GameBoard, the class holds the playing board and the list of corporations, has support for setting the state of input handling. It’s like a very simple state machine, with only an enum to handle it. Sometimes, the simplest is good enough.
Now, it’s possible to tell the game board to enter different input states, where some things are turned on and off, and input signals are routed to different listeners, depending on what phase the game is in. With this change, it’s easier and cleaner to see what is going on when switching between game states.
Information to the player
A thing I have noticed, and very much when I implemented the discard function, was that the game communicates very little to the player. You have to really know and understand the game to know what is going on at any point. Clear and consise information at the right time is essential for effectively teaching the player the game.
It’s a big task, because it can require text, icons, animations and improved visuals to convey the necessary information. It’s on the todo-list, but not prioritized at the moment.
Next step
Now that the game is playable from beginning to end, I have played a bit and naturally discovered some bugs. I will focus on squashing them before I implement new things.