It's official! I will make this a serious project!

And as any serious project, this one has a kanban board! Go check it out to see what I'm working on next!

Release 2024.11.1

This release is a collection of responses to player feedback that really highlighted some key fundamental design flaws in my UI. My initial, seamless and minimalistic A > B > C approach with icon buttons and labels turned out to omit a lot of information from the user behind a paywall. Can't afford this cannon? Sorry, can't see how much damage it does, it's range, or anything else. Granted, it was minimal. You could still see a lot behind, but that's not why you're trying to look at the menu, right? 

Major UI Overhaul

To be honest, there's nothing major to boast about here besides the accomplishment of moving a UI element up a few steps in the hierarchy in one afternoon. Unity UI is a bit... interesting. Let's leave it at that. I will keep the Github private because I don't want to show this framework absolutely wrecking me, commit after commit. Let's go on to the changes:

Building towers:

You always see the stats. That's it. Click on the tower to see the tower's stats. Click build to build. Yay!

Upgrading towers:

You always see the stats. That's it! Click on the upgrade to see how it affect the target stat. See how the other stats stay on the screen? Amazing. Also, revolutionary: Since reducing the spread angle is good, it shows as green and not red. Wow. Due to concerns I will not elaborate further, allowing the user to spam the upgrade button to upgrade the tower is not possible and I don't know if it will be anytime soon.

If you like the changes, let me know! If you don't, please tell me why! I appreciate the feedback.

Bugs:

Some bugs were smashed. Let's have a look:

1. Cannons don't speed up when time speeds up

I was using DateTime instead of decreasing a float variable. So that was a nice easy fix and the code is a lot simpler too.

2. Healthbars and build/upgrade buttons are so far away from the ships/cannons...

Another cool one from Unity UI. I project the UI elements using math from their 3D world position to the screen space. Then I use those coordinates to move the UI element. However, if you're using a canvas hierarchy, and the child canvas is where these elements exist, you better make sure its height and width match the screen perfectly. 

You thing "Oh, let's use a stretch-all on the canvas, and it will take up the parent canvas' dimensions, and it scales with the screen using a canvas sca..." 

"WRONG!" Unity kicks you on the shin, sending all healthbars out of the screen and displaying in all weird sizes. "You have to pin the canvas to the center. And set the height to match the parent manually".

"But... What if the user has different screen si..."

"You can enjoy the button about 30% of the screen away from the intended cannon, champ"

So I just skipped all that and broke the hierarchy up and made all canvases separate. Boom. Fixed. Everything renders as it did on... wait... Alpha numero uno? It was... a regression? All along?? 

Anyways. Let's see how that multi canvas root solution turns out. If you experience any performance concerns when a lot of UI elements are on the screen at once, be sure to pretend that it never happened and do not contact me at all. (JK leave a comment pls! Thx!)

Thank you for playing Recolonizer.

Enjoy!