It was a highly productive week. 100% of my time went into features and fixes that are required for the initial release (not always the case).
- Status effect icons. Enemy status effect icons now appear above the enemy. Player status effects are now represented as icons as well, located next to the health bar.
- Loading screen. New levels now display a loading screen, complete with a progress bar and text describing what is currently happening. At first, the progress bar was based on AsyncOperation.progress, which tracks the progress of an asynchronous scene load in Unity. The bar quickly got to 90% and then hung for around ten seconds. This delay was, of course, the procedural generation. Luckily, when I made the map generation visualizer last year, I had to reduce map generation into hierarchical, independent units of work – maps are generated by a series of processors, processors are composed of stages, stages are composed of substages, and substages are composed of tasks. The tasks are pre-generated and placed in a queue. This enables the map generation visualizer to display the result of one task at a time and interactively fast forward through substages, stages, and processors. It also makes it easy to calculate the progress percentage. I only had to make a slight modification to make it work with the loading screen progress bar, which was to wrap it in a coroutine and have it yield after each substage so that the UI could update the status.
- Cell selection improvements. The area of effect is now highlighted and the cell indicator (not just the mouse cursor) is now shown.
- 15 sound effects added.
- Bug fixes.
Next week I’ll take a break from new features to shorten the bug list. Saving and loading is broken again.
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