Monkey See Monkey Doom Weekly Reflection 10: Clicking Buttons
Previous Week’s Work
This past week I learned more about UI in Unity than I had over the past two years which isn’t saying as much as you’d think.
I had been avoiding use of Unity’s canvas features following a handful of head scratching attempts to parse the system in my games classes but looking back on what I accomplished this week I’m not sure where the hang ups were.
The Unity UI elements are powerful ways to immediately make a game feel more polished and by not using them on previous projects I unnecessarily handicapped myself. By conquering or at least dipping my toes into these components I feel Monkey See Monkey Doom is the most polished and responsive game project I have worked on.
The first item of business this week was figuring out the design of the main menu. I pictured designing the outside of the mall the monkeys are rampaging through but I wasn’t sure how that could correlate to menu items. After illustrating and scrapping a number of mall exterior buildings based on references I eventually managed to create three buildings that could serve as menu icons. I pictured players clicking on predefined hotspots that would act as a triggers to enter the various scenes but wanted a quicker solution. The quicker solution was to use UI buttons and have the shape of the button BE the building icons. With Unity’s UI buttons I was also able to determine highlight and click color for the buildings cluing players in on using the buildings as navigation.
Once implemented in Unity with a few new scripts I decided to make things a bit more juicy with rolling clouds and bounding monkeys. Creating my own emitter object allowed me to easily set all of this up. Without going into too many details (unlike every other one of my posts, sorry) the emitter spawns whatever object a player puts into it as a specific rate and can apply a velocity to the object created. As the player sits on the menu they can watch as the zookeeper chases a monkey as the clouds fly by giving the scene a lot of character
The second big change in Monkey See Monkey Doom this week is the completely revamped level select screen. After completing the main menu I realized that I wanted to return to the look of the highlighted sticker buttons for both clarity and polish sake and so I redesigned the level select as a series of mall boutiques that denote both the title of the level as well as the enemies that can be found in the level. With a good bit of scripting I was able to reconfigure my MapUi scripts to work with buttons and rework the locked vs. unlocked mechanism for the levels now visually represented by metal gates.
Ditching the map based approach I was so set on the past week enabled me to a find a much more elegant and interesting solution to the level select problem while also allowing me to give players more information (I.e the enemy types present) in an universe design pattern. Below are a few iterations of the level select icons that have at this point been fully implemented.
Current State of the Game
Below is a video showing the current navigation of the game. Gameplay wise the game has not changed since last week but with the new menus and UI design I feel the experience has more cohesion and professionalism that it ever has.
Looking Ahead
With only 2 weeks left the work remaining on this project ought to be minor if I want to get any sleep and to my surprise that looks to be the case! Of course I will continue fine tuning things up until the last minute but the only big ticket items left to complete now are the credits and how to play screen. I don’t imagine these taking much time but I have been wrong before. After those are done there are a million small things I will attempt to work through before the 27th. See you next week.
