For the past several weeks I've been focused on making a working UI system for our VR horror game. There have been plenty of ups and downs throughout this process and I wanted to take a brief moment to talk about the important takeaways I've gotten from the past couple of weeks.
The first of these is that creating UI in Unity is really easy. Unity makes it super easy to create buttons and sliders that do things and are easy to access from scripts. Once I got my buttons into place for my menu it was far easier than I had anticipated to make them load new scenes. This saved me a lot of headaches and for that I give the Unity program two large thumbs up. The second takeaway is that putting UI into the actual world space is really difficult. Due to our game being in VR it doesn't make sense to project our UI right onto the eyes of our players. This would probably just blind them and hurt to overall game experience. In order to avoid this issue, we need to put the UI a little bit in front of the player in the actual world space of our game. This of course leads to a whole host of problems in order for the menu to work. The menu can't be too far away from the player or too close. You have to work with the scaling of the graphics to make sure the menu doesn't accidentally stretch across the sky. We need to disable player movement around the menu so they don't accidental wonder off and can't find their way back. All these things need to be taken into consideration and sorted out slowly through mostly trial and error. There is no quicker way to make the UI work than applying some parameters and seeing what fits. These are the two biggest things I noticed while creating UI. You need to have patience when setting up your menu to work in VR. Thankfully once you find those perfect parameters the rest should come easily thanks to Unity's fantastic UI system. -What I've been working on -The joy of Unity UI -The patience of creating UI for VR
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This past week I buckled down to make the Main Menu and Credits scenes work. Originally when we made the Main Menu scene we only had a start button and so when the player clicked the button all we had to do was write a code that loaded the next scene in the build. Unfortunately when we added a credits scene this no longer worked as we needed the player to be able to get to either the Credits or the Main Game from the Main Menu scene. After a bit of tinkering around I got a new system to work based off the string names of each scene. I still need to do some work making the credits scene look nice and professional as well as adding sound to both scenes but by the end of next week the starting UI scenes of the game should be nearly done. Now that all the coding is done I can simply focus on making these areas of the game look good.
Next week I will: -work on beautifying the Main Menu and Credits areas of the game Recently Nintendo has announced the next mainline series Pokemon game: Pokemon Sword and Pokemon Shield. We haven't seen a lot about this game yet as there is currently only one trailer out however I wanted to go ahead and give my opinion on what I want to see out of the new set of games.
I have always been a fan of the mainline Pokemon games. I remember saving up to by my first DS and then using the extra money I had to buy a used version of Pokemon Diamond. The challenge of searching for where to go next. The rush of success when I defeated hard opponents, the sharing of strategies with my friends whenever we were having trouble defeating certain areas of the game, these are some of the most precious memories I have of playing Pokemon. The first thing I would like to see in the new games is a return to the more challenging side of Pokemon. The past couple of games have been fun but lacked the challenge I felt as a grew up playing pokemon. The puzzles in Gyms have gotten shorter and easier, victory road is now a mostly linear path without any of the maze-like qualities of past games. I want to be able to feel the rush of having accomplished something hard in a Pokemon game again. I realize that Pokemon's fanbase is largely made of younger kids but I hope that with the release of easier games such as Let's Go Evee and Let's Go Pikachu, game Freak will be more willing to up the level of difficulty in their main games to appeal to older fans. Many people who grew up playing Pokemon are now young adults and I think it might be time for a Pokemon game that's aimed at pulling some of them back into the fold. Another big item I would like to see in Sword and Shield is an emphasis on good story telling. My favorite Pokemon games to this day are Pokemon Black and White purely because of the beautiful and interesting story they told. I would like to see something similar in Sword and Shield. Sure battling and training Pokemon still has to be the main focus of the game. The player still needs to battle through all the Gym leaders in order to become the champion of the new region but that doesn't mean there can't be an interesting plot behind the core game mechanics. I loved in the Unova region when you tried to challenge the champion only to be suddenly surrounded by the castle of team Plasma bursting out of the ground. Twists like that make games interesting and keep players on their toes. Ultimately these are the two biggest changes I want to see in the new region. -The new Pokemon games Sword and Shield have been announced -Why I want harder games -Why I want a better story line Most of this past week was spent trying to solve one very specific issue. The school's internet stopped allowing our VR computer to use Google Drive. This meant we spent several days trying to figure out how we could access the assets we had put there in order to get them into the game. Unfortunately nothing we tried worked and we eventually concluded we would have to use a flash drive to transport any additional assets.
After we came to that conclusion it took roughly the rest of the week of the computer to wipe the flash drive then store all of the assets and scenes we had to it. Now that that's done we're finally back on track and next week I should be able to finish the UI menu. Next Week I will: -Finish the UI menu This week in advanced studies I focused on creating a script that would revive you when you died in our horror game. We decided the best way to revive a dead player would be to create a timer that’s automatically reloads the scene a set time after death. To create this script I mostly used my prior knowledge of coding UI elements as well as a code for a timer that I found online. The code was worked and I was I able to hook it up to the proper UI elements and finish my scene. Next week I can work on hooking it up to our game and fixing any resulting bugs.
I also made artwork for our credits scene which I can create next week as well. Next week I will: -Put the respawn script into our actual game -Create a credits scene off the main menu |
AuthorSamuel Henry is a Senior at DSA in NC. He has 3 years of prior experience in the game design pathway and he's looking forward to becoming a great game designer. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent those of Durham School of the Arts or Durham Public Schools Categories
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