User interface is very important in every game. It directs the player’s eyes and can help add to the overall experience of the game. I used the lesson from Unreal’s online course to help me, pausing in between lessons to use what I learned to update what I needed to in my game. I started off by cleaning up my HUD or heads up display. I had a lot of widgets which were made separately, several texts and what not that I was adding and removing one by one to the screen when I needed to. Thanks to the lessons I was able to see that there were better ways of doing what I wanted. I put most of my texts and images into one “canvas” and simply show and remove whatever is necessary.
A big change was also a lot of the functions I had were being called every frame, which can be taxing especially the more functions you have that are being called nearly every second. Such as updates to health, that doesn’t need to be called every second. So I added a function that updated the health bar only when the player got hit or healed, same for the boss. This took some time because I had to figure out the best place to plug these in and also get it working for the lantern light resource as well.
I added additional text such as showing when the game is saved. The course was nice enough to show me how to create a pause menu and even a main menu screen. I messed around with it a bit and created a simple menu where the character was in the background.
There was a lot to take in, a lot to learn, and a ton more to discover as usual. This is another aspect of the game that is another rabbit hole that is waiting to be fallen into. At least now I know enough to play around with it better. I also added a way for the game to easily restart once the player was dead. So there’s an actual game loop now.
While fighting the boss a thought occurred to me that he really popped out way too much from the environment. As much as I wanted him to be visible, it seemed like he didn’t belong. So I make his armor less shiny and it turned out well. He’s a bit harder too see but he isn’t visible and actually blends into the fog which fits better into the world.
I’ve encountered a worrisome bug where sometimes the whip pull control doesn’t work. Unfortunately I couldn’t replicate it. I adjusted the time required for the button being held down for the input to work so hopefully that fixes the issue.
Next up is finishing up the boss. I feel that with just a few more improvements he will be in a place where I won’t feel the need to visit his logic anymore.
GoldenGratus Games 