Devlog - April 16th 2023

Getting closer to completing the settings menu asset

This week’s focus was on the settings menu asset’s visuals development and improving the existing feature set. I started the week by doing another attempt to figure out why certain aspects of the editor related code isn’t working as I expect. After quite a bit of testing I finally figured out what was happening. I am quite certain this behaviour is a bug in the new UI system called UI Toolkit that I’m using for the editor menu used to create the settings. Fortunately I was able to implement a fix with only a handful of lines of code. After the fix was in place I moved on to working on the visuals for the asset and implemented very easy and versatile customizing options for future customers to use in order to create their own unique menus. Everything is definitely taking longer than expected, mostly because I underestimated how long it takes for things to get properly documented and made ready for others to use. Next week will be mostly finishing up the code, core asset features and visuals. Depending on how far I will get I might also be able to start working on tutorials and documentation. Definitely getting closer to a submittable version but I don’t really want to make any more assumptions until it’s actually done. I learned that the hard way while working on this asset. Hopefully my estimations in the future can be closer to the actual time required after I went through the entire process of creating and submitting an asset to the store. 

 Looking forward to showcase the asset properly (both in writing and showing) when it’s done but in the meantime there is a very short gif below showing how inputs are generated at runtime without prior need to set them up manually. Save and load support are also part of the clip. I’m not an artist so the visuals are mostly to showcase the systems flexibility for customization. Visuals are very unique to a game and it doesn’t make sense for me to spend much time on providing samples with the asset because most people will most likely be changing them according to their own requirements. I will however create a complete menu template as a sample which I will also showcase in a devlog once the asset’s development is completed.

Notable tasks this week:

• Further development of the settings/options menu asset

Wishlist on Steam

Join the Discord

That’s all I got this week. I hope you are all doing well.

Stay safe out there and I’ll see you next week.