Customization Options and UI
Over the past week, I have been implementing menus and UI. Galactic Soccer has a main menu which allows players to choose whether to play the game, access the options (pictured above), view the in-game credits, or exit the application.
This is my first game to utilize such a comprehensive options menu. As can be seen above there are many things which the player can change within the game. The name which the player enters will be used so that it will state who has won at the end of the game.
The colour of the ships (and their trails) can be chosen individually by each player (using the RGB sliders). A ship is shown either side to preview how the ship and trail will look during gameplay. These ships are controllable and can be rotated to allow a full view of the ship, with the colours updating in real time.
Players may now additionally choose how long they want the game to last. The text field will only allow players to enter numbers, and will only allow 6 characters to be entered. This is not much of a handicap to the length of the game, because a game can still last for a maximum of 277 hours (which is longer than most people would want to play any game continuously.
The ships are overlaid onto the options menu by each having their own camera which is projected onto the main camera. Everything seen (including the ships) scales with the resolution so that things should fit on any size screen.
For those who don't yet know, UI stands for User Interface and refers to the information which appears on the player's screen.
Currently, the UI shows how much time is left in the game (in seconds without decimal points), and the score each player has achieved.
Next week I plan to make the UI more visually appealing, as well as adding text which appears once a goal is scored or the game is won. If things go smoothly and I have enough time, I plan to make some aspects of the UI animated for extra visual appeal.