I couldn’t help myself and decided to go head first into getting a better UI system in place instead of just slowly making small changes and adjustments. I began by looking into what makes a good UI system and found what design features influence a players experience. The most important element was that the UI was simple and easy to use.
I also looked at other games in the genre to see how they handled similar problems in layout. With this information I roughly sketched up what things will look like and how the menus/options will be placed. Above is a picture of the improved UI with close-ups below of what the sub-menus will look like. This is still definitely not finished and I will probably end up changing a lot, note that many furniture objects don't have icon images yet.
Since the last blog post, I have made a few advancements with the room building function, where the player designates an area as a room, be it a lobby, bedroom or bathroom etc. I had previously got this function to work, but it was made redundant when I made other changes in related systems. The room builder instantiates a game object in the designated area and assigns all furniture pieces as children. On top of this I also worked on a highlighter for the room builder that highlights the designation as the player is drawing the box to show the player where the room will be. I also developed a highlighter for the wall building function to clearly show where the walls will be built with transparent blue walls that follow the cursor as shown below:
There were also other problems relating to my layers and the different building levels that i resolved during the last week, that are far too boring to share on here. I seem to be slowly but steadily chipping away at all these small issues/base systems and will soon be able to implement some more game-play mechanics.
Credit to game-icons.net and www.kenney.nl for the icons that i am using.