Devlog 3

Week 3 Devlogs Halfway through the project, and I have finished the UI as well as some of the more basic button features. Whilst I wasn’t able to properly get up a working version on Itch.io available for others to play and critique, I felt as if I already had enough on my plate to work on before the next valid version. That being said, I felt as if I was able to accomplish exactly what I wanted to do this week, with what I want to focus mainly on next week being the set up for an individual object – allowing the user to pick it up and look at it, as well as potentially allowing a scrollable menu and the ability for an item in the inventory to interact.

I want to break down each update that I have made to the game for this week: 1. The player character’s movement has been improved: Now not only does the player only move when the “walk to” option is selected, but it will not move over the UI. As you can see, the UI is quite large now and takes up a large portion of the screen. However, this is mainly done in order to make debugging and testing easier to perform In addition, the player is unable to walk in spots where the ui is visible, preventing the player from accidentally walking out of the scenery.

2. Action States: as you can see, I have now incorporated buttons to walk, pick up, look at and talk to characters; each of these contain a script that switches the player’s mode, and thus locks certain actions from the user. Not only that, but the selected button will darken in tone, thus allowing the user to easily distinguish which mode it is currently in.

3. UI. This was the more interesting aspect to try and get done, as I hadn’t done proper text fields in unity before. However, after reviewing some old code I was able to piece together a loose system involving a backdrop, a border that defines each item slot, as well as the image for the item itself. The inventory slots also include buttons, allowing the user to select them. Currently, the images are all blank, but I have a rough idea that I need to code in a function where the default image is set to the picked-up item’s sprite. The other two challenges that stem from the simple UI method as well is how to incorporate generating text (useful for dialogue and item descriptions) and how to change items in the inventory, but I figured I should instead leave those issues for when I need to tackle them. There was some new things that I learned how to do in this week’s coding time; namely, I learned how to use a Horizontal Layout Group to arrange my item UI without needing to manually set each of the slots, which saved me a lot of time. In fact, arranging the UI in general was a fair bit of a pain and probably what I considered to be the hardest task I did this week due to how Unity’s UI management can get quite messy (and for some reason my game object movement tools didn’t seem to work) Next week I should be much more free, meaning I’d be able to make a vast amount more contributions to the game than I had in prior weeks. Who knows, maybe I’d be able to get the talking AND inventory done in one week. Granted, it’s a pipe dream, but a possible one.