Update 37: Polishing the new UI

Another productive week, where I created more prototypes than I ever have before (in game development). When we last left off, I had created a GUI with a very discrete representation of health. 

The next step was to try and use the parallelogram design that so many modern games use. Fellow Turn based development enthusiast Stew Trezise (His website: boymeetsdinosaur.com) mocked up the following design: 

My first attempt seemed to have the health cells a little tight together. It looked great in the mock up, but needed more room. 

It also needed a slightly bigger border to give it more definition. The next revision was starting to make sense, but the empty health cells were not quite looking right as a white color.

I experimented with different colors before settling on no color. Here is the (current) final version, with transparent empty health cells.

As soon as I integrated this in the game (which was very easy since I was working off a GUI prefab), I noticed that having so many GUI's visible was a bit distracting. My solution was to show the selected player (and target) with the normal brightness and lower the transparency of everyone else by about 50%.

This works well, especially when there are a lot of units piled on top of each other.

Next, I'm going to work on creating a little hover to indicate status (and health) changes.

Update 36: Integrating the new UI to the game

I have a working game again. Each of my tanks now has the new GUI and I have more objects in my levels that provide cover and explode. I clearly have more work with the GUI, but it's giving me many opportunities to improve.

First, here is a screenshot of my slightly upgraded tile set. It is the first step in having more environmental objects. These will eventually become buildings, but for now are just big stacks of bricks.

Here are a few screenshots of the new GUI in action. It's currently pretty busy.
Very busy. There is a lot of GUI overlap, mostly because I'm using the default GUI slider control, which has a white border. 

I started by dropping the white border around the red bar. This helped, but the next stage is to highlight the targeted enemy, hiding the rest of the the (non selected) player GUI's

Eventually, I'll be creating a new GUI with a more discrete representative of the health. This will help to show how strong a player is, and really simplify the overall GUI.

Update 35: Back after a summer break and the new GUI

I had a little break over the summer to focus on a few other projects, but I never stepped that far away. With the release of Unity 4.6 Beta, I've jumped straight into implementing the new GUI. I've also further enhanced the explosion script and reworked the hover tank prefab to work with the new GUI. While the screenshot certainly doesn't look amazing, it is a big step forward for me to have a GUI that follows the character. Next is adding all of the new buttons and actions to the main GUI.

Here is an early sample of the new GUI in the main game:

Update 34: The AI is playing itself and the beginnings of a campaign.

Accomplishments this week:

AI: One of my next tasks was to apply the AI to both teams of the tactical game. While I wait for Unity 4.6's new UI to be released, using AI on both sides allows me to ignore the UI and refine the AI code. This also has the positive side-effect of preparing the AI to work better in multi-player games. This also includes selecting, targeting and dead (smoldering) tank animations. You can see these below.

Campaign: Moving next to the campaign, my goal was to create a very simple UI where:

• Time would pass
• Enemy encounters would be spawned
• The game would load the tactical level with the right players and enemies
• Auto resolve the battle with the AI
• Return back to the campaign, where the players would receive experience and abilities as they level up.

I had to fix a lot of bugs with the AI and camera to make this all work, including creating a new static game object, but it all works great.

What is next:

• Game Balance: The tactical game isn't currently very fair 
• Refining the character sheet: I need to add some new properties to the characters that I am now using
• Adding in the Campaign Diorama
• Adding objects to the tactical game
• Leveling up the tanks: Character progression is very important to this game

Update 6: Shooting

With a basic level, it was time to work on shooting. First things first, I had to get rid of the soldier model I downloaded. Instead, I transitioned to a simple, blue cylinder, my player object. I then created a few red cylinders to represent my enemy objects. 

Next, it was time to actually shoot. I started with a laser, mostly because instead of having to deal with an object moving from point A to point B, I really just have to draw a line. Later I'll work on getting animated bullets and missiles to be fired. Creating the laser, with a line renderer, was refreshingly easy to setup.  

With a laser, a source and a target, I was ready to shoot! I created a little function that scanned the level looking for objects of a certain tag type ("Enemy"), and used that to dynamically create shoot buttons, to target each enemy.