Small GUI additions

Today, I had about 2 hours to work on my game, as we just returned from the inlaws (which are lovely people) and I tend not to take my laptop with me when going for visits to them. Thats one of the perks of Easter. The aim of Easter is obviously to work on games - or else they wouldn't have called those funny features Easter Eggs - but now I hardly had any time.

What I did do is a couple of small things. First I changed the direction markers of the minimap to make sure to the front is always upright. I used to have the markers standing upright when facing north, but that did not make sense. Now the marker will be better. I will probably make the yellow player marker a bit bigger later, but I'm not sure yet. It all depends on how it will be in proportion once I put other elements in. Whetever that is going to be, don't expect the minimap showing random elements like "red ball". I found a quote on Twitter this week. If you put vital information on the minimap, players will look at the minimap and not at the game. We should avoid that, shouldn't we?

Another thing I made was a little change in the interaction script. Things could be interacted with if they had a WorldObject component, which is probably not very flexible, so I changed that to checking for a tag. Once the tag is correct, the interaction routine will find out what kind of interactible object we're looking at and that saves getting non-existent components. Not too big of a change, but a change nonetheless. I'm probably changing that later still, when I will have classes derive from the WorldObject, but we'll see how that goes.

Lastly, I reintroduced the Healthbar. I wanted to make it flexible too, so I made a system that will be able to be introduced with enemies and other guys too. One just links a health system and it'll be able to show health and fatigue for the health system. It all happend by changing the scale of a pivot object:

The only thing I now need to do is add a health system to the player and make it calculate the values of the scale between 0 and 1. That value should be the scale of the pivot.

Having said that, that is the bit of UI I wanted to do in the short run. After linking the bars to the player, I'll enter my first NPC, a friendly guy that will give a quest involving a red ball, probably. That'll take a lot of extra steps. I'll need a guy graphic (which is going to be very poor), a quest system, a journal and a bit of interaction between the player and the NPC. Should be enough for the week.