January update - I see you UI!

Hello there!

I both hate and respect UI.

I say that because I've just spent the last several weeks updating and creating both the notepad and computer terminal screens, and while I finally have something functional it's definitely a "Glad that's done!" moment.

The new notepad UI above, and one screen of the new computer terminal UI below...

The notepad art is more first-pass, while the computer terminal is all placeholder visuals for now as I've just been focusing on getting it working correctly. But it does work! I even have a togglable login screen that needs the right passcode entered before you can use it :) 

The biggest headache was fixing errors I made when I created the first iteration of the notepad as 'past me' had no idea what he was doing. In the end I had to make a new hierarchy from scratch and copy across what I needed from the old one, ensuring the structure allowed both the Dialogue System and the scrolling text window arrangement to work together:

Yeah, that was as much as fun to make as it looks  :|

The  main issue was getting the correct nesting for all the related elements, because it has to be pretty specific for the Dialogue System, and highly specific for creating a scrolling text window. It was mainly thanks to this 2016 blog post that I finally managed to figure out where I went wrong with my initial setup: wrong parenting, missing components, components in the wrong place, and the Unity classic: forgetting to tick/untick specific tickboxes that make massive differences.

And while you can see the visuals and the hierarchy there, what you can't see are the PlayMaker logic events running it all in the background, which was just as much fun to set up and test. Thankfully, these are the only two UIs I need to make, and will be used for every notepad and terminal in the game, with some additions for special situations, but nothing major. So, other than the art, I'm actually done!

At least I have a much better understanding of best practices for creating UIs now, and a couple of templates I can re-use in future, so overall it's a decent gain from all that swearing at the screen.  Which reminds me, I still need to make a proper start screen and update the temporary pause menu, so a bit more UI work to go.

As for the rest of the game, I'm adding in the last of the dialogue options and fixing bugs in the first three areas which will be explorable in the demo. And when will there be a demo? Don't ask me. I have just as much of a clue as you do! But I would like to get it out this side of Easter, so let's keep it as vague as that for now. Lovely.

Tony.