Hi all,
Welcome back to the dev log of Project Hunter. It’s been another week of progress on the project. As stated last week, the next steps are to work on the menus and UI of the game. The reason for this is that the interaction of the UI is a major aspect for users, meaning, it’s kind of the middle man between the back end at work and the user.
I started by looking at menu techniques used in software and games alike, and as I’m using Unity I thought; why not look at some Unite talks on UI and menus as well? The Unite talk from 2017 (Video) given by a developer at Yousician talked about the generic menu system they made, as they use a lot of menus within the software. I began implementing a menu system like the one within the talk to cover the project needs, and there are not a lot of menus but I want persistent menu management throughout the scenes.
Another topic is the UI, which is tied in with the menus that are being created. So to begin with, some UI implementations have been that; when hitting an animal an image will transition by scaling in and out over a period of time, to help indicate an animal has been hit. Within the menus, there are buttons that transition by movement and scale to give a better feedback to the player. Other UI updates are the transition by movement in the Y direction of the player score, player kill count and the arrows the player has remaining while in game. This UI animation is not a large movement so it should not obscure the player or distract them from the game, this is yet to be play tested on mobile so this could change.
As you can see from the slideshow below the current systems in place for the main playing scene hold a frame rate of around 16-20 on mobile, which isn’t too bad but improvements are needed in using jobs and ECS system in Unity. Another note, is that the environment doesn’t look filled or pleasant so I am working on fixing the grass patches generation to not overlap over the edge of the environment. Furthermore, I think there will be an addition to the size of the environment, along with some more polish around the environment to feel more like a hunting reserve, as well as, adding hunting areas instead of pads to move to, possibly fences around the edges which is another look into the terrain generation
Excuse the facebook messenger pop up, I was messaged while it was loading.