DevLog 5: Polish and UI

This week my main focus has been thrown into levels, such that I can get a playable game out first. But I have made a fair few important changes to the UI, the focus of this DevLog. So, what did I add?

As I was told I should make sure to have something like an easy mode, or checkpoints, I thought an easy in-between would be a level select (Other changes for ease of access are being added too!).

So, for the intended four stages, you can travel to any of them straight from the title!

One other change that I added that I was pretty happy with was:

The health bar now contains text! And, rather than just turning into empty space as it shrinks down,

It now has an actual background! Nice.

Now this little bit of the UI (probably only appearing at certain times) should give you a hint on the next big add.

Signs! This game altogether is a prototype, but I wanted to get the barebones of a “dialogue” system in there, even if it wasn’t quite dialogue (although it might be as the game/levels progress).

This little guy is something that I made as simple as possible because I thought it would be cool.

The signs only have a sprite renderer, to be visible, and a box collider, to be interactable. Then where is the text stored? The name!

Then, the player has a little bit of code wherein once contact is made with the sign, the message changes and the player can hit F to have it pop up! Nice.

Not a huge number of relevant changes this week, but I’m working on it!

What I couldn’t get done:

I really liked the idea of the adding more visual effects to the laser. I tried to add a particle effect that generates at the end of the laser. But not only would there be particles, the ray cast that generates the laser would pick out the colour it touches and change the colour to that! Awesome! But… Every attempt started to crash Unity every time I tried to use it. It’s on the backburner for now.

Feedback

• Notes on the anti-frog tank not really fitting in with the frog. I think I need to change it so that it’s clearer it’s an anti-frog army ground vehicle.
• Positive notes on the jumping frog enemies, especially about them being difficult to predict!
• “I always liked the idea that you go "into" a level without the laser, and you have to come "out of" the level with the laser, so every level is played twice with different skills” was a note given in my survey, which I think is a really interesting idea. I’m not sure if it’s something I can implement right now, but it’s something worth looking at.
• Notes were also given about the signs and lack of obvious interactability. I’ve changed what was originally “press F to interact” to “press f to interact with signs”, but definitely adding some sort of marker might be the way to go.