UI, Achievements, New Tiles

Sunday, 7 October 2012 - UI, Achievements, New Tiles

UI
I began working on part of the UI. The UI is not fixed to the camera unfortunately. So when I zoom in, the UI will disappear! I have to fix it such that it is always at the top of my screen no matter whether I zoom in, move left or right. Most solutions online say to use scrollfactor. It works for games that have no zoom level. However, my game has multiple zoom levels. That makes it complicated and I cannot use scrollfactor. I can't find a solution online so I guess I have to come up with a formula to fix the coordinates of the UI.

I also drew a character selection UI. It shows up on the top right and is an indication to what character the player is controlling.

Indication Arrows (to draw attention to character's location)
I also added indication arrows that will appear above the selected character's head whenever the player switches characters. This was suggested to me many weeks ago, but I am already beginning to work on the UI now, so I decided it was time to add this feature in.

There is a bug now. The arrow will not disappear after showing the character's position.

New Tiles
I created two new awesome tiles! I really love the new tiles! I created a snow tile, which is actually a recoloring of the newest tile I created yesterday. I also created a dark, black tile. I put them in some new test levels and they looked really good. But if I do not intend to add new levels in this current game version, then those tiles might not have a chance to appear in this game =(

Still, they look really nice. I hope to create levels that use them, but I have lots of things to polish and touch up before I move onto the creation of new levels.

Achievements UI
I added a very cool achievements popup that will appear whenever an achievement is earned in the game! Sadly, it appears for a few seconds, but oh well it's meant to be like that. I also added a close button to close the achievement popup. The close button, ironically, does not work yet.

I also started to create the achievement logos. I've drawn two of them and they look very good so far.

Surfing for Background Music and Sound Effects
I started to look for suitable BGMs in the wee hours of the morning when it's all quiet. I knew it would not be an easy task. I have listened to 166 BGMs. And I am still listening now. Of these, I have picked less than 10, and a lot of them I've rated only 2/5 or 3/5 - which means they still might not be the BGMs I want in the game.

I also went to find some of the sounds that I need in the game. Although the game isn't close to completion yet, there are some sounds that I know will definitely be used in the game as I know there are areas in the game which are already fixed. (Well this is one advantage of working alone I guess, though there's probably 5 disadvantages for every 1 advantage).

End of Day Thoughts
I spent most of my day working on the UI and much of my morning listening non-stop to BGMs. It was kind of frustrating - sometimes I thought a BGM was suitable, and then suddenly it starts playing loud drum beats or sounds that were definitely not what I wanted. I can't skip to the middle because it's not buffered yet. Oh well.

I also wasted a lot of time today trying to fix the zoom bug, which I didn't manage to fix in the end. I got pretty restless and tired trying to fix that issue. Adding multiple zoom levels to the game is really a lot of work and killing me. What's worse is that the zoom level must now be designe to be able to be manually toggled by the player. I have to make sure everything works. This sure isn't easy =(

I am sleeping very late everyday and this is bad. I must try to sleep earlier. It's 8am now. Good night!