2/21-3/7: HUD
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past two weeks. Here are my updates:
HUD/Pause Menu (13 Hours)
The entire two weeks have been spent implementing the Heads Up Display(HUD) and the Pause Menu. Here is a more in-depth breakdown of what I’ve implemented.
A significant amount of time of the week involved planning what the UI would look like. In particular, these involved discussions with Brandon S and Paul Young. The main objective was to answer questions like: How should XP changes be displayed? Where should all the elements be placed? How can we go about decluttering the UI? By the end of these discussions, we ended up with a pretty good plan about how to progress on the UI. (This took 1.5 hours)
My next step was to implement the basics of the pause menu. This involved two steps: implementing the ability to pause the game and translating my work over the previous two weeks into the main game. To pause the game, the game deactivates a number of systems, such as the player’s ability to move the camera, and reactivates them when the game is unpaused. I then transfered alot of my work from the test scene into the main game, including the tab system and the tooltip system. (This took 2.5 hours) Here is a picture of the current pause menu (note that other than the tabs, none of the buttons here work):
I then started work on the HUD itself. This included a bunch of relatively simple, self-contained elements, such as the health bar, glide bar, charge bar, health text, experience text, and currency text. The main challenge with these components was finding and getting the necessary information from the scripts that controlled them. For instance, the glide script didn’t have an ability to get how much of the glide was left, so I had to read through the code and publicly expose the variables I needed for the glide bar. (This took 3.5 hours).
Throughout the whole process, I implemented some important player systems. This includes the Experience Manager, which allows the three types of experience points to be accessed in one place, and the Drop Experience system, allowing enemies to drop experience. (This took 0.5 hours)
I spent much of my time implementing the ability UI. Many of the game’s abilities have certain requirements about how they can be used that needed to be communicated to the player. For instance, Revenge requires a charge, Clairvoyant has a set duration it can be used, and the Dash can only be used a certain number of times. I created several UI components that could communicate each of their abilities. As I searched through the Player scripts, I noticed that many of the ability have a “cooldown”. I created an interface called ICooldown where each of the ability could easily communicate the status of their cooldowns and implemented it for each ability that had a cooldown. (This took 5 hours).
Here is an image of the final HUD:
