The Journey Day 16
Welcome to the user interface…
As this is the last week of my game development internship I made a personal goal to be done by Thursday. Sitting at 80% done I know that it is definitely doable. However, that “doable” is not going to be without a heavy lifting load of code if I want to have this project ready and under my own tree in time for Christmas. It’s time for Santa’s largest elf to kick it into high gear.
Today started simply enough. I left the game project in an error free state at the end of last week. It was pretty intense. Introduction to React for Lambda had my brain turned almost entirely to the same sort of slag I was hoping to reduce the baddies to by the end of today. Hopping in, I didn’t have to worry about debugging, I could just move on and add features to the game.
I started by setting the UI manager as my canvas. This canvas holds all the items we will be keeping track of. Score, health, and restarting the level on player death will all be handled through this element. As we will be updating the score with each enemy blasted I left the value set to empty for now. Immediately I tuned the colors, scale, and positioning to my liking.
Working for Marriott, we utilized Franklin Covey’s 7 Habit’s of Highly Effective People to help manage our deployment of change. One of the core philosophies is to make a scoreboard. Make if engaging enough (and visable enough) so that people will feel motivated to keep going as they always know the score. I must admit, however, in this moment simply seeing a functioning scoreboard was motivation enough for me to keep pushing through the day. Halfway through… I still had bigger plans for today.
It was at the end of setting up my game UI that I came to the point of needing to set up a main menu/ title screen. I went through the standard setup… but if you’ve learned anything about me in general.. there is NO SUCH THING AS STANDARD. Especially when it comes to pushing the creative envelope through practice. This is the time to make sure you’re up to game speed. As Michael Jordan was known to say “Practice like you’re going to play.” Whether it’s the finals or taking my first steps of C#/ Unity development, I never plan on skimping practice.
I mentioned taking time last week to learn cinematics, scene setup and layout in 3D. It was time to take the basic screen and steal a page out of Chef Daniel Humm’s book…. “Make it Nice”. I started by using the title splash that came with the project. I used a little more neutral background as I planned on making the scene explode with action. Literally. Grabbing some of the elements from my scene I added animated asteroid bases, planets and additional player sprites and set the battleground.
Taking the time to manipulte in 3D last week really helped set this up today. I was able to move all of the items into place without much issue of manipulating the objects. It looked good… really good…. but again… how far can we push the envelope in quality. It’s been my creed in life and today would be no different. So, taking explosion sprites from my enemy destruction animations I blew it up adding explosions throughout the scene.
This gave it an entirely different feel. You could feel the action vibe coming off of this main menu screen. But I still wasn’t done yet. I mean.. all of the explosions and nothing causing them?? So I took my triple shot laser, deconstructed it and lined it up in the scene so that our protagonist could be seen coming out of an asteroid base mid shot. Game, set, match. This was the look that I was hoping for. Fortunately for me, I’m no stormtrooper and I did in fact find “The scene that I was looking for”.
With all of that handled I wanted to take one final lurch forward today and get the explosion animation sequences set for my enemy craft. As the day is almost over I wanted to hit that stretch goal today of getting the animation sequence in. Setting a new state as my starting point and using my animation as the transition my bad guys were finally blowing up… albeit as they instantiated but watching them blow up for the first time felt good. Stopping here would leave me at a good place for tomorrow’s fun so I cleaned up, saved my work and wrapped up.
Today was a highly productive day learning some new things as well as putting into play a good amount of the work that I did last week in learning scene setting. I have three more days by my own count to deliver this game for the holidays. I can imagine that it must feel like this whenever game development houses have tough Christmas deadlines to meet as they seek to capitalize on the gift giving power of the season. I came, I coded…. and I kicked butt today. I WILL be delivering this before Christmas… otherwise I may be sticking a lump of coal in my own stocking.
