Game Development – Nr.6 | Magic Writer
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Hello everyone! This weeks post will be related to the last post. The last post was about me creating a power up bar that loads up and lights power up icons when they are ready to use. Since last time we have redesigned the power up bar. The last example was draw by me (programmer art) and was not very pleasant to look at. We want to avoid static HUD as much as we can, this means that we do not want to incorporate for example a HUD frame that show the current score or a HUD bar that show when power ups and their cooldown on them. We want to display these things in a way that we can show inside the game world. As an example we show the current score that the player has written into the sand. So we redesigned the old power up bar, it is now shown by having small buoys connected on a rope that goes out into the water. We have two of these ropes in the game. One on each side of the screen, the left one represents the power up bar and the right one represents health points.
This is how it looks right now The white buoys represents how much the power up bar is loaded. As you can see it is half way to reaching the top. It has passed the first power up icon and it is shown by making the icon light up, the second and third is still darkened out. To show the player how to use the power up we have bigger buoys next to each icon which represents which key the player is supposed to press. The bigger buoys will switch from red to green when they are ready to use, showing even more that the player can press the numbers shown on the buoys to activate the power up. By representing the HUD inside of the game as props i think it makes the game look a lot better and cleaner. We can get rid of these sticky HUD bars and numbers but there is also a risk with doing it this way. The player may think that the props are just that…. props. I think it is important to have them dynamic, constantly changing to make the player understand the meaning of them. Both the power up bar, the bigger buoys and score in the sand is constantly changing.  |
