Week 22: UI

I survived the unwrapathon that I had dug myself into from last week. I only spent a day unwrapping, but it was one long day and I won't be letting the unwraps stack up again. I'm perfectly okay with unwrapping, just not a days worth of it. The rest of the week has had me doing some small amount of modelling and a large amount of UI stuff, which has been going surprisingly well until the last day or so.

I modelled the tree roots that we want poking out of the level, which caused me to play around with splines in 3DS Max and the Path Deform modifier as well. Any other modelling I have done has been me tweaking small things in my previous models and adding collision meshes into certain assets that will help test the level.

As this is my first time creating a UI in a game the earlier portions of my week were filled with experimentation in Unreal's UI designer were I had only really scratched the surface, as I am sure there are an unlimited amount of possibilities with this tool. As I became more comfortable with the editor I turned my focus to the design of the pause menu, the only reason I chose the Pause Menu is because parts of that are actually working at the moment. I did a rough concept before I started on the final design.

I wanted the design to reflect what we were trying to do with the actual game, an almost hand crafted UI with parts looking cut out and stuck together like a diorama. If I can figure out how to animate within the editor then I'll have the various sections fly in as the Pause Menu is loaded to really try and sell the handcrafted style I want.

The entire thing is still a work in progress at the moment and small errors keep popping up, but never the less I'm very pleased with the results so far. I spent about an hour trying to figure one small annoyance on Friday night that I have only just resolved while taking screenshots for this blog post. I wish I knew what I did differently within the last 10 minutes but I am not quite sure. Anyway, here's the hover state example for the buttons which are now working! *cough*

Next week I'll be doing anything that the groups needs me to do, which I imagine will either be texturing or some more modelling. If nothing pops up though I'll be continuing on with the design of the Pause Menu and moving on to the actual HUD of the game.