There was nothing really exciting that happened over the course of this week. My work mainly consisted of more UI work like updating visuals, fixing bugs and altering systems

Updating UI Visuals and Design

Now that the systems and infrastructure behind the start menu and player UI were pretty much done it was just matter of making it look nice and user friendly. In order to give us some visual direction and cohesiveness our artist Rhys supplied me with some visual mock ups and assets for the UI. The design of these mock ups and assets were fairly minimalist and shared the same vision I had for the UI. Void of any real color the buttons, panel and text followed a very simplistic geometric design with slight curved edges. Transparent elements let the background visuals bleed in allowing for the visuals of the game to stand out, which was exactly what I wanted. 

With this new vision and assets I had to go through every screen, button, image and piece of text and match it up with Rhys’ mock ups. This was a very tiresome and tedious process but it was worth it because it gives the game polish. Unfortunately some of the designs didn’t fit into the logic of the UI which meant I had to alter some code. This wasn’t hard to achieve but was a little annoying because it took up some time. The whole process was a little backward but we got there in the end. It would have been nice to have the mock ups and assets since the start of the UI creation but unfortunately personal issues and other priorities in the project got in the way. The UI is in a good place now and is almost near completion. Thankfully there will no longer be any major additions. Further work on the UI will just be bug fixing, polish and small gameplay additions like alerts and a chat box which shouldn’t be too hard to make.

Grail Icon

One new thing that I was tasked to add this week was an icon on the grail. This icon is meant to alert players to the location of the grail and potentially the player who has it. This icon is suppose to drive players toward the objective and focus the action of the game.

This little icon seemed simple at first but what i started making it turned out to be more difficult in the first place. The easy problem was getting the rotation to always face the camera how there were two quite difficult problems I had to solve. One problem was that the icon had to be rendered in front of everything else. I have no idea how to write shaders from scratch because I’ve only ever used Shader forge. The effect that I wanted just isn't achievable in that tool so unfortunately I had to take a shader from online to solve this problem.

The other problem is that it had to scale depending on how close you are to the grail. This sounds simple but was actually a little difficult. I first had to get the percentage distance between three vectors (minimum distance to the grail, current distance from the grail and the maximum distance from the grail). The current distance move between the range of the min and max; returning a percentage depending on where is lies in the range. 

Then by using that percentage I had to get the scale value between 1 and a float(max scale) you could set in the inspector. So if you move in between the minimum distance  and maximum distance to the grail it should multiply the icon’s scale between 1 and the scale you set in the inspector.

I was never the best at math so I’m quite proud that I was able to solve it without getting the answer straight from the internet(because I couldn't find one). Who would have thought that high school algebra would actually helped me.

Playtest

This week’s playtest had its ups and down. On the one side we gained some great feedback to the game and players were legitimately enjoying themselves playing the game. This was very validating and motivates me to improve the game further. However with the implementation of some new systems that have never been tested before in a real scenario surfaced some very nasty game breaking bugs. Me and the other programmer Rupert are fairly confident we can fix them it’s just a little concerning because there is so much more we need to do and we only have around 4 weeks to go until the final submission.