Setting Up

This week was dedicated to doing "setup" for the RPG-style battles in Viola. Spawning party members, spawning monsters to fight, creating a UI to keep track of the characters' health and other values, and creating the start of a menu for the player to use. I also did some graphics research to get pixel perfect assets, as well as optional scanlines!

​Click 'Read more' to read more!

Setup Wizardry

Spawning the party was a pretty simple affair: just look at the PartyHandler and spawn clones of the stored game objects. Similar to spawning party members for the instrument mechanic.

Just needed a few extras to make sure the characters fit within this different type of scene: drop shadows were added and a few settings in the rigidbody and playercontrol scripts are changed to make sure they don't drop down.

Thanks to the work done on the pause menu and the main menu, figuring out how to do an in-game menu was rather simple as well.

It doesn't actually do anything, but that's for a later sprint.

The health bars turned out to be a much larger challenge. To create the bars themselves, I used the Unity "Slider" UI element, modified to do something different from its original function. A Slider is supposed to be an interactive UI element so the player can adjust values, commonly used for stuff like volume. Instead, I took out the interactive elements and let code access its values, so it can refer to the health points, ability points and rage points of a spawned character.

The second challenge was how to make all this information fit onto the screen. Five party members makes for a lot of UI real estate, so to speak. The original health bars were much larger, so I had to compress the information. I also needed a visual element to tie the set of bars to a character. I originally wanted to do that through positioning, but there was simply not enough room.

The original, with functional, non-visual slider.

Concept for the new healthbar UI.

The eventual 'product', neatly lined up at the top of the screen.

Finally, the visual effect seen in the above GIF. "Scanlines", the lines you would often see displayed on a CRT television while playing video games. Lots of retro emulators give the player an option to display scanlines, which add to the nostalgic feeling. I'm planning on making this an optional effect in the game.

The scanline script was not made by me. I got it from this person's GitHub.

Next week, I'll continue working on the RPG battle system. Specifically, turn order and progressing through the battle by giving commands.