Week 11 - Checkpoint 5 - User Interface

Welcome to the next blog about Blue In Town's building process! As I said in the last post, this week's devlog will contain many significant updates to discuss since I not only added several new UI elements and functionalities to the game but also fixed some bugs mentioned before. As usual, I will also summarize some feedback from other players and point out the remaining errors.

Let talk about the user interface in the game first cause it is the main topic of this week. I created a main menu with a colorful background and
several functional buttons (including Start, Help, Settings, and Quit). 

The Start button leads to the game scene after clicked. 

The Help button allows players to open instructions for the game (such as how to play it or how to control the characters).

 A list of customers with their level of patience, tipping habit, and other features are introduced in there as well.

I am also making a summary of all recipes and dishes' prices, but I could not complete it before uploading the game on itch.io. At the moment, only the Start and the Help button are having functions. I will add more things to the Settings and then Quit button so that players can regulate the volume of the game sound and quit the game.

In many weeks before, I already started creating some IU elements in the game scene. For example, a little board of customers' info will pop up for the first time of their appearance. Also, the recipe which will appear whenever players press R, the inventories, or happiness bars. This week, I added a score display at the top of the scene with three little stars representing three achieved goals. Each star will appear when a certain goal is reached.

Back to the blog last week, there were some downsides in the level that need to be improved. Firstly, in the previous version of the game, Blue could not pick one dish up. I finally found the reason was due to some typing errors and fixed it already

Now, my Blue can grab all of them to her inventory. I also changed Alice's filter mode to none to make the sprites not to be blurred. 

At the moment, Rin, a customer of Blue's restaurant, can do some actions when being at a table (such as ordering food, eating, and waiting for having a check). Her happiness will increase if she is assigned to a table fast enough, or her food is served quickly within a specific time. 

She will become unpleased if having to eat an incorrect dish. In this case, Blue must deliver a new one for her. 

After customers finishing eating, Blue needs to give them a check and clean the table before they leave.

Before serving food to customers, players need to make sure that the number of correct dishes in Blue's inventory must be corresponding with the number of customers at a table. If customers have to receive more than what they requested or do not get enough, their happiness will decrease. 

When testing the game, a player in classmate said he got a feeling that Blue picked the food up quite fast. Then, I immediately thought about the reason which was because of its box collider. I will add an edge collider to it to check if anything is more realistic. Besides, another comment of him was about the error of that Blue would move around when he selected an object or dragged a customer. I also noticed this problem before but have not spent time finding a solution for it. I will probably replace the current implementation of selecting objects by using a raycast from the camera.