Polish and UI Devlog

Hello and welcome back to my devlog series. We're starting to wrap things up so today we'll talk about polish and UI (mainly UI). 

The first thing I wanted to implement was a Title Screen. To create the background art I used sprites from the main game to model a small segment of a maze. To my distain, this took way longer than it should have. I didn't realize the Unity Editor used snapping so I had been manually entering coordinates until the scene was nearly complete.

 Why didn't I use a tile map you might ask? well... I'm just going to pretend I can't hear you. Once the background was all sorted I added objects from the main game, a title and some buttons.

The title font Yoster Island, created by Codeman38 can be found here https://www.1001fonts.com/yoster-island-font.html

The Start Game button will do exactly what you think it will and the high score button will also do exactly what you think it will, but I'll tell you anyway just incase. The High Score button will take you to a new screen that displays the highest score achieved in the game and the players name/tag which is set upon the high score being achieved. 

With this in mind I added a score counter to the maze scene that gets displayed in the corner. The player earns points by dodging armor statues and making them crash into a wall or another armor statue (worth 1 point) or by escaping the level (worth 10 points)

I also added a scene to enter the high score and a scene to display the high score. To create the art, I made the best decision of my life, I copy and pasted the title screen art into both scenes. 

In previous weeks many players have voiced their frustrations with the mini map taking up too much of the screen and it drawing over the player. To fix this I decided to add a button to toggle the mini map being displayed. 

Another polish I added to the game was fixing collisions between armor statues. Previously upon a collision they would engage in a pushing match and ultimately just stand still staring at one another. 

I also fixed collisions between Clawdius and the armor statues so that the armor will get destroyed.

To my excitement, this may be the first week where all the feedback regarding the weeks additions has all been positive. Players that have tested the game multiple times were especially happy with the addition of map toggling as it was a long running topic of complaint.

"Thank you for finally fixing the mini map"
"Toggle map button is great. It was annoying when it was over the player"

However, there really is no pleasing everyone with one person recommending moving the maps position to a corner. 

This is the current state of the map but there's no doubt it will change again before the games completion.

The other recommendation I received was to have a high score table instead of just the highest score. While I agree this would be a good feature I'm yet to think of a good way to implement it.