The chain

There’s not been much progress over the past two weeks due to illness. I’ve been working on adding the health bars to the enemies, and trying (and failing) to create exactly what I wanted in Unity, so had to alter the design slightly.

What I had been trying to create was an animated health bar, that was masked to only show the correct part of it, and then masked again to fit into the health bar surround. Unfortunately, Unity doesn’t seem to natively support alpha masks, and the main plugin that people use to get around this issue doesn’t support multiple masks. Although this UI work is slow going, I’m glad to be learning about it now, rather than in the time pressured environment of a GameJam.

Anyway, what I’ve now got working is show above - a that will change colour as health is lost, and gently animates. I’ve added a simple health value to the right-hand side. I think I’ll make this optional in the game as it doesn’t look as clean as it could, but it’s useful to know exactly how much health the enemy has left.

That health value is actually the main reason for the change of colour with the health bar. When the health bar is a darker red, you couldn’t easily see the numbers. To make this work and not have to put the value outside of the health bar (or alter the health bar design) I used the inverse gradient of the power bar, starting with a light colour at full health, and getting closer to a blood red as the enemy’s health gets low.

To help me work on this project, I’ve been using an widget called “Goal Tracker”. Using the idea of “Don’t break the chain”, I check off any day that I spend at least 30 minutes on Dungeon Golf. Before this illness, I’d gotten to 24 days in a row - some of those were only to make sure I didn’t break the chain, so it seems to work so far. The next goal for this will be to beat that, although life with a toddler doesn’t always make that easy.

Next up should be making sure the health bars are attached to the enemies, and that I can spawn the two together