Been a few days since my last post. Main thing I have been doing are generally smaller and less substantial but are just taking time to sort out. I have started the UI and menus for my game. I have been using the unity event system to try and make the menus work with keyboard and controller. The UX of the system could be better and I am struggling to find a way to detect the current device (I want prompts and control mapping images to change based on input device). Plus, the UI could do with a lot better art. I spent a lot of time creating icons for abilities and to make the player HUD look nice. I will need to spend some more time on the other menus such as options to look nicer, but I may do this after hand in as this is a stretch goal at this point. I have also had to implement dying, checkpoints and AI/enemies spawning when in a range (I have enemies in set places but having them all active at once would be a waste of processing). I had some trouble with resetting the player's position, this was strangely due to the character controller component. It was the first time I had issues trying to set transform.position and it was annoying as no errors were thrown and the players position vector did actually change but the players object just did not move. Took longer than I would like to admit to figure out 😊 I am also currently adding in music and trying to implement my own version of adaptive music. I am not using real adaptive music as I have no knowledge on the area but my way around it is to check if the player is in combat, and if so combat music will start playing (fade in over the top of the normal background music). I intend to have background and combat music playing at all times as not stopping them so that when they fade in or out, they are not starting from the beginning every time.
The UI as it currently stands can be seen below. The fonts are not finalised yet so take them with a grain of salt but the functionality and aesthetic are in-place.
Regarding the HUD, I have two icons representing the current usable abilities, the icon fills up based on the abilities cooldown and are faded until the player holds the magic menu button (as you can see above with dualshock it is L2 to activate abilities). I am thinking about adding the abilities input too when holding the activation button so the player knows the exact input but I personally love a minimal HUD so will leave it unless testing shows players are struggling to remember the controls.
For the death screen, I blend in a new post-processing volume that desaturates the scene and adds a vignette. This makes the text stand out and add to the finality of dying.
EXTRA: Two small camera transitions/cutscenes have been implemented but are not done yet since they need to coincide with the dialogue in the game which needs to be implemented. I am also still working on the script and I am trying to create more emotion in the games story than there was originally. Hopefully I can get the music, UI/Menus, complete playability (the game loop – die, restart etc) all working nicely so that next week, I can get testers to start playing the game from beginning to end to test functionality whilst I implement dialogue and quests.
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