Devlog - May 15th 2023

More improvements and customization tools

This week’s focus was on creating menu layouts, polishing systems, cleaning up code, more quality of life improvements and a cool new feature for color palette customization. For the layouts I created several of the most common I could find on gameuidatabase.com. Since a tab menu is used quite frequently I created one too. It can easily be used for horizontal or vertical tabs. Many more layouts can be derived from those I created within minutes. For example having the menu centered versus having it in any corner is just a matter of changing a few values. The new color customization allows users to do live changes to specific colors in the menu. The colors can also be easily extended if a user needs more or less of those variable colors. While this system started as a color customization tool I also ended up extending it to changing fonts and font sizes.

In terms of quality of life improvements I will only mention the most impactful one which is allowing users to drag and drop a preset (a collection of settings) into their own list of settings. This essentially adds the settings available in the preset to your own list making it even faster and simpler to create the list of settings the user is looking to have in their game/project. These presets can of course also be created by users themself but I also created a bunch of them to cover the most common use cases. This preset system makes the creation of a setting system so easy that you can literally have a working menu with the settings of your choice in seconds. Depending on the amount of customization and custom input elements this of course will take longer but those custom input elements would always need to be created regardless of someone using my system or any other/their own. I also went over all the settings and defined default values so things like the render distance have values that make sense but can also be customized if need be. For this week I will focus on more cleanup and polish to hopefully get close to the first version I want to release very soon. While the asset has taken me significantly longer than I originally had planned - it has also grown in terms of features and is turning out to be much more powerful than the asset I had in mind. I think the additional time it took was worth it to make it that much faster and easier to create menus with.

Notable tasks this week:

• Created various menu layouts
• Created flexible tab menu
• Assigned settings default values
• Added style profile support
• Added settings presets

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.