Devlog 5: UI Time (01/10 - 17/10)

To best capitilse on a captive audience (they're fine), this week was spent completing a variety of tasks.

TL;DR: Introduced stamina and cooldowns for Spells and player movement, UI to display change in these new values, and music to accompany the onslaughts of enemies from spawners. Also, testing happened, but that's for Devlog 6.

Chapters

1. Setting Boundaries
2. UI, for You and I
3. Spawning Infinite Dudes
4. Tunes
5. Testing (Devlog 6) Teaser
6. Known Bugs & Issues

Setting Boundaries

In previous versions, the player could move the wizard as much as they wanted, and were able to cast Spells at rapid rates by clicking quickly enough. As this will be very unbalanced for certain future features, two limitations were made this week to slow these actions down, these traits being stamina costs and cooldown timers. With this change, movement was only made to be limited by the quantity and regeneration of stamina, and were not given explicit cooldowns, though dashes may receive additional changes at a later time. Spells on the other hand will likely all use stamina costs and cooldowns, as they allow weaker Spells to compete with strong Spells due to these restrictions, but they also provide a simple throughline to alter less balanced Spells.

UI, for You and I

Occasionally over the course of week 3, but mostly during this week, the main gameplay UI was built.

The first priority was creating a more visible health bar and the newly required stamina bar for the player. After some fine tuning, the existing Creature health bar code was able to be used on the built-in Slider UI elements, which made for adequate player meters (these can also be customised further later).

The star of the show would have to be the combined appearance of and functionality behind the Spell icon bar. It processes key (and scroll wheel) inputs to select the desired Spell, and signifies that Spell by enlarging its icon. It passes the selected spell to the player's wizard to cast, displays the name of said Spell (sporting a font from KennyNL), and manages the visual representation of the cooldown once it has been cast. The UI region can accomodate multiple Spell icons within it, and each icon is generated on starting the game, which allows for varied inital Spell loadouts to alter this order.

Lastly, a simple kill counter was implemented and placed above the players meters, all this took to operate was a few modifications to the base Creature Methods.

Spawning Infinite Dudes

Arriving (very) late to the week 3 Behaviour Creature update party, simple spawning scripts were made and implemented onto unkillable objects along the edge of the arena. These created a copy of a lich or ghost at random intervals, which also randomly increased in speed as the game continued, and purposely raised the implicit difficulty to the point of the player's demise.

Tunes

A simple looping track was implemented as ominous background music (made by me 😊). Additionally, there is a check for the number of enemies on screen, which can switch the music to a much more frantic track. This transition (and other new ones) will be receive more attention in the future.

Testing (Devlog 6) Teaser

At the tail end of this week, feedback on Wizard Colosseum was collected from a small audience (thanks for all your input!). Some of the data and suggestions from this testing will be interpreted and factored into existing plans for the game next week, a majority of the rest will be filed as a possibilities to eventually add. Some items of priority include: Spells rebalances, sound effects, and Behaviour Creature pathing changes.

Known Bugs & Issues

No new fixes this week. (Previously complete items have been removed)

• (From week 1) Creatures can occupy the same Tile (and phase into terrain), due to relaxed restrictions.
• (From week 1) Cameras move slowly when returning from left and right boundaries.
• (From week 1) Health bars could be on a World Space UI Canvas.
• (From week 1) Wizard turns weirdly sometimes when moving diagonally.
• (From week 2) Rapidly casting Spells lags the game a bit.
• (From week 3) Colliding with a Creature (notably the lich) before it moves causes teleporting, due to improperly saved Tile data.
• (From week 3) Behaviour Creatures not navigating at all.
• (From week 4) The Arcane Seeker Spell does not fire at the desired angles.