UI/Polish

General Overview

Welcome to the second to last devlog of Forsaken Colony: Last Survivors! This week will be about the user interface and music/sound effects I added to the game.

User Interface

Ingame Scene

The amount of UI elements in the ingame scene is rather small with only the most important things shown at the top of the screen (figure 1). to the left one can see the ingame timer counting down till it reaches zero, which marks the point at which enemies stop spawning. In the middle there is the health and experience bar with corresponding health and level counter. I used the same color palette for the health bar/health counter as well as experience bar/level counter in order for the user to be able to tell what belongs together. To the right is the counter for the ingame-currency (blood). All those UI elements have been hand drawn in Piskel, the sprites/spritesheets can be seen in figure 2.

Menu

This week I added a settings-tab in the main menu of the game as the user should be able to adjust the volume of music and sound effects. The settings menu can be seen in Figure 3.

The music and sound effects slider are interactable, the keyboard controls are only of a descriptive nature and can not be changed.

Moreover, I introduced some minor changes to the UI of the permanent upgrade system by replacing the old level indicator (which was the experience bar from the ingame scene) with a more fitting sliced texture. I also added a scrollbar at the side of the upgrades panel that player's are immediately able to tell  that there are more than three upgrades to choose from (as suggested by Jack). The final look of the permanent upgrades menu can be seen in figure 4.

All the windows an buttons in the background derive from the same texture from this UI asset pack. The buttons and sliders have been recolored using a color palette with only grey shades in order to be able to recolor the buttons to any color by only changing the color in the unity editor (the original buttons were more of a blue-grey color and multiplying them with another color didn't look very good/didn't produce the desired outcome). The original buttons and their recolored versions can be seen in figure 5.

Music and Sound Effects

As including the music tracks and sound effects directly into this devlog is not possible (at least to my knowledge) this section will only briefly picture what audiovisual components have been implemented.

Music

Currently, the game has four different music tracks. A happy upbeat track for the main menu, a more tense and adventurous track for the main game loop and a track for each ending screen (whether you died or beat the stage).

Sound Effects

Sound effects in the game are currently very limited; Sounds for the player attacking and enemies taking damage would be played several times per second in a later stage of the game and therefore it only makes limited sense to implement those. At the moment, there are sound effects for following events:

• Generic button click
• Start button click
• Levelling up
• Player dying
• Player beating the stage
• Campfire "animation" in the main menu

More sound effects might be added at a later point.

Player Feedback and Planned Improvements

I did get a lot of feedback this week and already implemented/changed some aspects of the game to be more in line with what people recommend. Points of criticism were:

• Quit buttons not working
• Character could use a victory sound
• Health regen system made health upgrades useless
• (Permanent upgrade system: no indication that there are more upgrades further down - already mentioned in User Interface - Menu)

These changes/improvements were implemented to :

• Added Application.Quit() for WebGL in my OnClickQuitApplication-script
• Added sound effect for player beating the stage
• Nerfed all health/health regeneration upgrades, reduced basic player health from 70 to 50, reduced basic health regeneration from 0.3 to 0.1

Outlook for next week

For next week there are no set plans for improvements; I mainly want to focus on feedback from Friday's testing session and implement new features/introduce changes according to those recommendations.