Completing Chrysanthemum's UI

The first step to completing the UI (user interface) for Chrysanthemum was to give visual indications for combat. I decided to give the enemies a health bar just like the player had, but it would be displayed in world-space above the enemy's head. The bar is a child of the enemy prefab, so it follows around the enemy as it moves throughout the level making it easy to identify which bar correlates its respective enemy.

A view of a simple enemy and its health bar.

In addition, I also decided to create a new frame for the health and mana bars to better represent the style of the game. I also created a similar frame and icons for each spell to display the spell that is currently selected. This gives the player a visual indication of which spell they will fire when they activate their secondary attack.

A view of the updated player HUD while in game.

While playtesting, we noticed that players found the transition between levels off-putting, as we had not designed anything to conceal the scene loading. Due to this, I decided to work on a loading screen that would display between scene changes. At first, I simply had the Chrysanthemum logo fade in, then fade back out whenever the scene had loaded.

This was fine, but the scene loaded so fast that it was practically not even a transition. I decided to add a minimum loading time of 3 seconds between scenes to make a proper loading screen. However, after doing this I noticed that the game was giving no feedback to the player. This could look like the game was frozen or stuck for some time. To fix this, I made sure that the Chrysanthemum logo spins during the loading screen.

A video of the loading screen transition into the first level.

Another issue we encountered while playtesting was that there was not a proper transition back to the main menu or to restart the level when the player died. To solve this, I simply added a menu that displays when the player dies similar to the pause menu with options to restart, exit to the main menu, or exit the game.

A view of the menu after the player dies.

Justin Simmons

07/21/21