Peter Eldredge PPJ# 5

Team Meetings - 3 Hours
UI Updates - 4 Hours
Enemy Behavior Updates - 1 Hour

 UI Updates
This week I focused primarily on polish in the menu, especially the Level Select UI. Now, when you open the panel, an animation will play of the "Map Window" opening and then the "Notification Panel" sliding out. When a level is selected to play, those panels fade out while closing, and then a new level is loaded.

This was done in order to smooth the transition between the Level Select UI and the level being loaded. Since we don't do any asynchronous loading in the game, by fading to black before loading that massive hitch isn't really noticeable. To smooth it even further, the levels now fade in very quickly when loaded, we opposed to just immediately starting.

The Title Screen was also redone. It now has a more simple, clean aesthetic to match the direction the UI is going. Here is how it looks at the moment.


A map was also added to the Level Select UI, here is what it looks like currently.


The animations on them are very simple. To try and keep them appear as if they were popping out, I put a Rect Mask 2D below the border object, and lined it up with the edges of the border. I then set that mask to stretch with the border, so that by increasing the size of the border I was also increasing the size of the mask. I then wrote a very simple animation to scale up the size of the border.



The Open function returns the length of the animation it is playing, so that we can keep the animations synchronous.


The notification panel was similar, and to fade out I simply added a panel to the foreground which was a flat black image, and then wrote an animation which lerped the alpha value of the color.

Overall, I think the UI is beginning to look pretty good. I need the assets for the remaining screens though so it can be more consistent.

Enemy Behavior
I made some tweaks to the laser attack behavior. It now allows us to set the number of shots in a burst, the rate at which shots are fired in the burst, and the time between bursts. This system can be ignored completely by setting the shots per burst to 0.

Upcoming
I want to keep updating the UI when we get more assets, and hopefully smooth out the flaws in consistency. Additionally, I will implement the new enemy once I get the assets for it.







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