Seams - Week 4

Hello and welcome back to the weekly devlog for PsychWard. Apologies for being late with this one, I'll do better next time but for now let's recap whats been going on this week.

Nothing much has really happened in regards to the team itself or the design of the game, our goals this week was mostly to continue what we had started doing previously. The only change that I can recall that was significant was that my task of making a cork board UI got moved to the other programmer, and that I was now in charge of working on the main UI elements.

Assignment

As I just said, this week's assignment was to work on the main UI for the game. Throughout the past two weeks the design for it was planned out. The idea is that the game will have an overlay constantly covering part of the screen and on this overlay the navigational buttons for accessing each menu will be located.

(A mockup of the overlay UI as well as some of its submenus)

As the actual assets for this UI haven't been made yet (or at the very least I haven't received them if they are finished) the current UI is made using blank coloured squares but the main overlay and its buttons function at the moment, although the submenus haven't been programmed yet. This is how it looks in unity:

There's a lot of objects that currently have no visible meaning so I'll quickly explain what each one does. The top left object will open the quests submenu, the one below that will open the character profiles/corkboard interface, and the button below that (which is also below the four blue squares) will open the inventory. The four blue squares above that button are supposed to be a small row of items as a preview to the inventory. The top button on the right is a quit button and the button below that is the settings button.

The green bar below the settings button is for a mechanic called 'sanity'. To my understanding, the bar decreases (or increases, I'm not sure if that's been decided yet) based on how long you look at some of the enemies for and the game is supposed to change to reflect your current sanity (e.g. sprite and music changes throughout the game).

The player is able to toggle into controlling the UI by pressing escape or start by default (and unlike the dialogue system last time this actually utilises the input system properly) in order to not conflict with player movement. As a matter of fact, I went about designing this UI completely differently to how I normally do, which might explain why it took me so long just to make one interface.

Usually when I program a UI I don't use Unity's default UI objects and tools. For the most part this was because I didn't realise until a few days ago that you could navigate through multiple UI elements with the keyboard by default, as I had assumed they only worked with the mouse. What I always ended up doing was basically hard-coding an entire UI system for each game I made, it was incredibly tedious and messy with expansions to the UI being super difficult unless I had anticipated the specific changes beforehand. Now that I've figured out how Unity's built-in UI tools and the event system work to an extent I feel like I could make much cleaner interfaces that are much easier to expand on.

(A snippet of code from my last project 'Game Dead', this was code for the UI on the main menu and shows off how bad it got)

So far the UI script I have for PsychWard contains functions for each button and code for toggling menu activation.

One other thing I did this week was make some of the changes to the dialogue system that I mentioned in last week's post. That being using the Character class I had made in order to store details for the character such as their name, portrait and voice since as it was before you needed to specify all of those for each piece of dialogue, which got very annoying and tedious to work with.

Now the interface for dialogue objects looks like this. It looks better than before while still functioning exactly the same.

Reflection

So here's a new one. Each week from here-on I'm going to be a bit more reflective of what I have done throughout the week and see if I'm up to snuff essentially.

This week I really didn't get up to as much as I probably should've and the consequences of this is that now I have more work for next week piling up, and this blog post was delayed by a few days. This is a pretty big issue of me not feeling motivated to work on the project, mostly thinking "Oh I'll just do that tomorrow I have plenty of time" every day until suddenly it's Thursday and I've done nothing at all. This is something I will improve on going forward and making sure that I have more new things to show each week.

Alongside that, I think I need to improve on my communication with the rest of the team. Admittedly I don't talk to them much (about the project anyway) and as a result I don't always know what I'm doing or at least how they want something done which makes me hesitate on working. Once again, that is more an issue of me not being the sort of person to approach others in general than the other team members not communicating.

Overall, I think that's everything for this week. Next week I'm hoping to have more to show but we'll see. Thanks for reading once again and keeping up with the development of PsychWard, I'll see you next week.