Hey everybody. In the last couple of weeks I was working on a basic menu and HUD for the game. There is not much art assets involved as I used only placeholders, so I’m not gonna show you some shots ATM.
At first I designed 2 different UI for them, but then for some reasons I decided to integrate them into one. So right now the result is an SWF file including both menu and sub menu pages plus the HUD including support for subtitle and a basic support for question system. At this point the goal is to finish the functionality of the UI, and I don’t care about the visuals.
The next step for the UI is to finish UI part of the question system, and then add the multilingual support to both subtitle and question parts of the UI.
The only major gameplay feature that I’ve done since the last post is the Question system. The game we’re working on involves a few dozen decisions for the player which he can never come back and change, and he has to face the consequences for them, good or bad. Most of those decisions will be made through answering a question with some predefined answers. With this system we are able to manage all those questions in one place using archetypes. Following is the major features of this system so far:
- The main goal, much like the Dialogue system, was to ease the managing and handling all the questions in both content browser and kismet, gladly we’ve reached this goal.
- This system has a queue for simultaneous questions just in case, so like the Dialogue system if anything goes wrong, system can handle these kind of situations.
- Each question can have 2, 3 or 4 answers. This numbers are hard-coded and I didn’t add the ability to change it via archetypes. The reason for this was the UI part of the system and its limitations, and also we only need 2 or 3 answers for each question ATM. However if the time comes and we need more I can change the numbers in code and modify the UI part accordingly.
- Like I said, there is no way for the player to go back and change his/her decision, and they’re completely permanent. Because of this we want to be sure that the player is able to understand his/her options before he/she chooses one. For this I came up with the idea of a simple (but not necessarily short) tooltip or comment for each answer. Right now each answer can have a tooltip, the only thing the player has to do is to hover the mouse on an answer to read it’s description.
- I also added a couple of kismet actions and events to have a good control of the system in kismet. The most important one, is an event which will be called whenever player chooses an answer, so kismet would be able to act accordingly, as most of our decisions involves modifying some actors in the level itself.
- Also there is some properties to customize the visuals of this system via archetypes as well as a few debug and log options.
The next step for this system is to add multilingual support for questions as well as answers and tooltips, and also adding a feature to play a voice for the question. Hopefully I’ll post the details when most of these are done.
Thanks for reading and good luck.
