TDEMO Week 4: Fantasy Platformer

Having worked on the code aspect of games for the past 2 projects, I wanted to focus on something else for this week's game project, which was a fantasy-themed platformer game. However, I lacked the tools and knowledge to really work on the art or the sound aspects of game creation, so I decided to work on the UI aspect for this week.

As I soon discovered when doing some research on the topic, there is very little actual user interface on platformer games. Two such examples I found were from Super Mario 3D World and Celeste: neither really had anything much apart from a timer and (in the former's case) collectables in the form of stars.

As such, for our game we only planned on having a timer and a collectable, both of which can be tucked into the corner. We didn't plan on having lives - the character would just respawn each time they fell off the map, so that was not required.

In addition, our UI group also made the buttons for the main menu, pause menu, and other controls. They linked to separate pages on the same scene, activating and deactivating separate sections.

After that was complete, we worked on creating a pause screen for the game. The idea was to just overlay a grey layer over the game itself with an option to quit, which was achieved by creating a new canvas and deactivating it by default, only activating it when the escape key was pressed.

Next, we created an end screen for when the player completed the game. For this, we needed the splash art created by our artist team, as well as a counter implemented by the coders which kept track of the number of collectables the player collected during the game. I also created a "Play Again" and "Quit" button for the end screen for QoL changes.

One problem we ran into when creating the game on the UI end of things was that we weren't able to hook up a sound slider for the game's audio, so we had to remove that in the final build of the game. We also discovered that the "Quit" button on the end screen didn't work at all, but this problem was found near the very end so we didn't have time to fix it before the game was pushed out.

Overall, I feel that as a group we worked well together and we were able to coordinate the teams in such a way that no one was left out. However, I felt that some teams had more work to do than others (eg the art team) because artists were in short supply on our team so we had to wait for the assets to come through before we were able to fully build the game, which led to some time shortages. This time, we didn't manage our time as well as we should have which led to some crunch time on the last day before release.