Swipe

Swipe is a circluar keyboard designed to mimic the one used in the popular mobile game Wordscapes

Example

Check main.lua for a working example. Tested on mouse, technically speaking should work for touch screens? Let me know if they don't.

Usage

(swipe.lua is pretty heavily commented, if you just wanted to skip this part!)

Put swipe.lua somewhere into your project, and import the usual way

local Swipe = require "path.to.libs.swipe

Then initialise as follows

local keyboard = Swipe.new(
  -- cx for the keyboard
  love.graphics.getWidth() / 2,
  -- cy for the keyboard
  love.graphics.getHeight() / 2,
  -- initialLetters to seed the keyboard
  { "a", "n", "g", "l", "u", "r", "a" },
  )

Optionally, you can specify options to pass to the constructor. The defaults are shown below:

local defaultOptions = {
  -- Wheel
  wheelColour = { 0.890, 0.890, 0.890 }, -- colour of the wheel background
  wheelRadius =  150, -- size of the wheel
  drawWheel = true, -- whether or not to actually _draw_ the wheel
  -- Text
  textColour = { 0.133, 0.133, 0.133 }, -- colour of the text on the wheel
  textFont = love.graphics.newFont(), -- the font to use to render the text
  -- Selected
  selectedColour = { 0.843, 0.176, 0.631 }, -- the highlight colour
  selectionRadius = 30 -- the radius of the select
}

Then, you'll need to attach start, moved, and stop event handlers.

• For a mouse, hook into mousepressed, mousemoved and mousereleased
• For touch devices, touchpressed, touchmoved and touchreleased

  local currentText = nil

  function love.mousepressed(x, y, button)
    keyboard:start(button, x, y)
    -- or keyboard:start(id, x, y) for touchpressed
    currentText = keyboard:get()
  end

  function love.mousemoved(x, y)
    keyboard:moved(x, y)
    -- TAKE NOTE OF THE ID:
    -- or keyboard:touchMoved(id, x, y) for touchmoved
    currentText = keyboard:get()

  end

  function love.mousereleased(x, y, button)
    currentText = keyboard:stop(button, x, y)
    -- or keyboard:stop(id, x, y) for touchreleased
  end

Make sure to pass in the button or id to the start/stop functions to ensure it's tracking the right pointer.

stop will return the final list of letters that were selected, otherwise you can call get while you are currently swiping on the keyboard to retrieve the selected letters in order. If you call get when you are not swiping, then it'll return nil.

To update the keyboard's letters, you can call keyboard:setLetters(newLetters)

Attribution

Example font is mini-wakuwaku by miniyama, gratefully retrieved from https://www.freejapanesefont.com/mini-wakuwaku/