To get myself organised for the next couple of days I wrote a list of things to get done, some would be easier than others and some were definitely more important than others.
For example, the game could definitely get by if the characters didn’t all have different expressions during dialogue, but it wouldn’t fly if you had to restart everything after a single conversation with an NPC.
After the team call on Monday I got assigned to finish off the missing parts of the UI as well as fixing any issues I had with it the last time I opened the project, I also volunteered to create a main menu screen.
Main Menu
Last time I worked on the project I had already created a new scene, I made a new canvas and created a very quick background by repurposing my showcase poster.
I created two buttons: Play and Quit, followed by a script telling them what to do. Play would call the scene manager to load the main camp scene and Quit would simply shut down the application. This is also when I decided to look at how to import fonts into Unity since I was sick of looking at Arial, despite all of my time looking into fonts for the game I just asked Rosie and we went with a font called Audiowide.
With the buttons working, I quickly added the background title music produced by Yiran and it was a working main menu that takes you to the main game and lets you exit.
Pause Menu
It made sense that the player while in-game should have the option to exit out of the game or head back to the main menu. Following a tutorial I wrote the appropriate code to stop game time and essentially freezing all action behind the menu.
To my surprise this worked perfectly and came together very nicely.
I wanted the pause menu to appear after pressing the escape key and I tried modifying the code in a few different ways on my own to get working. I tried using an if statement with Input.GetKeyDown and a boolean to check whether the game was already paused but it just didn’t seem to work, which is a shame because I thought it would be super easy (it probably is, I think I was just already feeling overwhelmed). With how much there was left to do, I left it as it was.
I considered adding a pause time button, not as a menu but as an actual mechanic in the game but with how much time I spent trying to trigger the menu using the escape key Rosie told me to leave it as it wasn’t a priority. She was right to tell me to move on.
Miscellaneous Changes
- Changing the character sprite cards to the updated pixel art ones made by Gabi
- Changing all of the game font to NOT Ari*l
- Displaying the correct information on camp menus
- Fixing the dialogue option buttons in the narrative scenes
- Time slider was changed to a bar
- Added background music to main gameplay
What I wasn’t able to do
I really wanted to be able to tackle the big problem of camp progress not saving going from the camp scene to a narrative scene, I found it difficult to understand Joe’s code and asked him to point important things out for me but even then his save manager was still long and complicated. To add insult to injury, I also couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to stop the camp menus from merging with the camp sprites below them, so I decided to ask Ross if he would be able to give me a hand with both problems on Wednesday. He agreed but said the priority would be sorting out the saving between scenes. Totally fine by me.
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