Devlog July 10th - Settings menu

 Welcome to the first devlog of July!

This period we have added some dialogue and a fight in the north eastern part of the Northern Hills area.

We also added a new variety of goblin

The exact position of the enemies will be updated in the future. For now we were focused on the dialogue.

We then started creating menus for our game. We started with the Main menu and the Settings menu.

For reference, when the period started, our main menu looked like this

The old menu was transparent and so the game world is visible behind the buttons.

This menu was very basic and used default buttons and fonts from the Unity engine. We always intended to replace it with a better menu that fits the aestetics of the rest of the game.
Here's the new and improved main menu:

The background was originally drawn for our Steam store page, but we intentionally drew it so it could serve as a menu as well.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that we now have four buttons rather than three: That's simply because we didn't have an exit button. Before, there was no way to exit the game beyond system shortcuts like Alt+F4. Now, we have a "save and exit" button and as the name implies, it will even save the game. The save will be called Autosave and can be found in the Save/Load menu.

Next, we upgraded the Setting menu. Again, let's start by looking at the old menu:

Similarly to the old main menu, this is very bare-bones. It only has toggles for disabling music and sound effects, and a "Controls" button that will lead to a different menu.

Let's have a look at the new menu:

We drew every button, slider and checkmark in our style to ensure that they fit the style of the rest of the game

The toggles and button from before are still there ("Controls" have been renamed to "Key bindings")

In addition we have added a number of sliders and dropdown buttons. Let's go through them from top to button.

We have added volume sliders for both music and for sound effects. We could now consider removing the old check boxes, since there's not really a difference between setting volume to zero and disabling sound entirely.

The "Text Speed" slider controls how fast the text appears in dialogues. This is a common setting in games with a lot of dialogue. If the slider is set to the maximum, the dialogue text will appear instantly.

Resolution and Screen mode are also very common settings in games. The Resolution dropdown will show available resolutions based on the player's screen. Screenmode gives three options: Full Screen Window, Maximised Window and Windowed.

Finally, we have added a "UI Scale" slider. This will adjust the size of various buttons and menus in the game, including  this very screen.

Here's a screenshot where we have increased the buttons to the maximum size.

We had to add a scrollbar because there isn't enough room on the screen for these big buttons.

That's all for now.

Next time, which will be on July 24th, we'll have a closer look at the other menus: We have a menu for Key Bindings, and another for saving and loading games. Both needs an overhaul similar to what we've done here. Talk to you then!