UI & Systems Development

For my first milestone on Chrysanthemum, I decided to tackle creating a basic main menu. Since this system would be mostly unrelated to the character and level design that the rest of the team was brewing up, it would be a good opportunity to work on it early.

I began by brainstorming what we wanted to display in the menus at the start of the game:

• The title of the game

• Credits and attribution

• Volume control

• Customization of controller/key mapping

• Save data selection and management

In addition to these requirements, I also wanted the camera to move to each new menu physically rather than all of the menus being in the same location and changing visibility and/or text. I would ideally like the background to be an environmental scene similar to those you might find in a typical level in Chrysanthemum, however, I currently have a solid color background image for simplicity.

I began dividing the menu into sections whos unique world-space would house similar elements. I came up with 5 sections:

• Main Menu: home to the game's title and buttons to each sub-menu section

• Credits: displays information on our team and attribution for non-original assets

• Settings: houses the controls to customize your game experience (custom controls, audio levels, data management)

• Save Slots: shows three individual save slots for the game and all information collected about those saves

• New Game: prompts the player to choose a name for the save file and starts the game

A full view of the menu sections of the basic menu layout.

A view of the sliders for the volume settings in the main menu.

To make any of this UI (user interface) work properly, I needed to create a menu manager script. However, I wanted to begin with higher level management scripts before I finished the UI. This lead me to create the following manager scripts in order of importance to the current goals:

• Game Manager - controls scene management, player preferences, and save data

• Menu Manager - controls movement and visibility of UI elements in the main menu

• GUI Manager - controls the movement and visibility of UI elements in the game

• Audio Manager - controls the sound levels and triggers of all audio mixers

• Inventory Manager - regulates the items and weapons the player has on them throughout the game

Now that these managers were working to regulate the processes of many of the game's basic functions, I simply needed to connect those scripts to the UI elements that were created. Most of this was a simple as dragging and dropping objects and methods into serialized fields in Unity's inspector. After a bit of tweaking and testing, we now had a basic working UI that accommodated save data and personalized settings.

Although not all of the managers that were created in this milestone were needed to develop the UI, some of them interacted in some way. Creating them all early allowed me to be able to connect some portions of those managers to the game's user interface while also setting up for upcoming gameplay and mechanical development.

Justin Simmons

06/28/21