Custom Inputs and Player HUD

Much of my second milestone was focused on finishing a basic version of all the systems and UI (user interface) that the player would interact with throughout their gaming experience. The only portion of the main menu that I did not get to complete for the last milestone was the custom player input that I had planned for.

Most of the setup for the UI itself I had already completed. I had simply created button for each game control that could be clicked to assign a new input for that control.

A view of the custom inputs selection in the settings menu.

To begin scripting, I created an Input Manager script that would house the methods that manipulate the game's inputs and controls. When a button is clicked, it will run a coroutine that waits for the next player input and assigns that input as the new game control. In addition, I also had to add a reference to each game control in the Player Preference Data script that I created in the previous milestone (it was home to only the audio level references, previously). The last bit of scripting involved adding a few methods that would change the text on the main menu to display what the current input for each of the game's controls were. This updates the text any time the menu scene is loaded or a custom input is changed. This system is now complete and simply needs to be connected to the Player Controller script to access the custom inputs rather than using hard-coded ones.

I now needed UI for the in-game scenes: a pause menu and a player HUD (heads-up display). The pause menu was relatively simple with after all of the system work that I developed for the last milestone. I just copied the style of the menu canvases I created for the main menu and added it to a test play scene.

A view of the pause menu while in game.

For scripting, I added a check for when the player presses the escape key to toggle the menu's visibility and pause status. Then I simply had to tie the buttons in Unity's inspector to the methods already created for scene changes.

The last thing I needed to create was the player HUD. With Chrysanthemum being a relatively simple game, the only things that really needed to be displayed to the player were the amounts of health and mana the player has at any given time. I created two colored UI sliders with a simple frame for this.

A view of the health and mana sliders that display at the top of the player's screen.

Then I created three methods that manipulate these sliders. They can change the max amount for each slider, restore the slider to it's max amount, or change the amount of the slider in some way. Similar to the custom inputs, these methods will be connected to controllers created by the rest of the team that tell them when they should be changed; for example, when a player is dealt damage by an enemy or when a player picks up a flower that completely restores their health.

Justin Simmons

07/05/21