Now that the UI elements were created, during this Sprint I set to implement all the Objective UI so that the information gets dynamically communicated to the Player. For example, I started by making a dropdown menu that displays the current Objective.
It’s pretty straightforward. Since I made the ObjectiveManager a Singleton, it’s super easy to add scripts that can reference it. In this case, it let me make a simple script that displays the current objective. I did however have to learn how to make a Mask for the UI element, to make sure it doesn’t display over the top of the toolbar.
Next I worked on the actual Objectives menu, which is accessed from a button on the first dropdown.
It’s a pretty straightforward menu. There’s one tab for the current objectives, and one tab for the completed objectives. The script works just like the dropdown, except it runs through the whole list of objectives and adds them to a string to display. I haven’t used this much text in a 3D game before, but I got used to utilizing text displays during my other classes in c++, and this task helped me learn to do it in Unity.
Since I already made the Objective system, it was pretty simple to get them all to display here. The trickiest part was definitely the checkmarks on the completed screen. Rather than trying to place them on the screen separately from the text, I created a sprite sheet asset using the checkmark asset provided. Then, I could use TextMeshPro to place it as a symbol in text.
Lastly, I was assigned to make a sample level based on some tutorial designs to learn to use the Data Model Editor. I followed along with the existing video created by our predecessors, and also had to read some documentation to find information the video didn’t cover. Overall though I didn’t find the editor tool too difficult to use, and demonstrated by making this little sample scene. In the future, we may make some small, simple levels like this for the tutorial levels.
One limitation I did run into is that I couldn’t find a way to change the size of the ground itself. I limited the area I worked in to 4 chunks, so that we can carve it down in the future, but I’m not even sure if the tool has a feature to make the landscape smaller–I couldn’t find anything about it in the tool or documentation.
