(Small animated gif to showcase the general current state of the game)
Week 9
Hi and welcome to the ninth development blog for Unleash!
The new UI, previously mentioned multiple times, is finally nearing completion. Additionally, we are working on finally bringing leaderboards into the game visually.
New UI
We have implemented the bulk of the in-game UI, and are now in the process of testing it. It needs to be thoroughly tested over some duration of time to ensure that there are no breaking changes. The new UI is vastly different from the old UI in look and feel, even though the functionality has generally stayed the same. There are still a number of fixes and tweaks needed, before the new UI is ready for public release. However, having it implemented in the game means that it is testable, so this is a major step for the game.
(The pool menu UI for all monsters.)
With this new UI, we can easily show more monsters than we could previously. Additionally, the floating elements without backgrounds means that the background is partially visible behind the buttons.
(The pool menu UI for all structures.)
The structure pool menu is functionally and visually as close to the monster pool menu as possible, in order to have consistency in the UI look and feel. The red buttons are tinted due to me not being able to afford the structure at the time I took the screenshot.
(The game state UI showing your own resources, as well as the resources of your assailant and target.)
The state of the game - your own resources, life, spawned monster count and the countdown till next income - is now grouped together with the bulk of the UI in the bottom of the screen, and the amount of colors in it has been reduced.
(The new minimap UI.)
The minimap is so far still pretty much the same. It has been given a colored border. Eventually we will probably have some background texture for the minimap to make it more interesting.
Leaderboards
Leaderboards (ranking) is also a feature that has been underway for a while. Since the new UI is settling in, the time has come for implementing the visual representation of leaderboards. The first step for leaderboards will be limited to the Classic TD game mode. Each TD scenario has its own leaderboard, and we are thinking to show the leaderboards through their own menu point in the menus, as well as when a TD scenario game ends. The functionality for the leaderboards is more or less finalized, but the UI is still very much in progress.
(Work in progress for leaderboard UI.)
Closing Remarks
UI, UI and even more UI. We are working hard to finish up the implementation of new in-game UI and leaderboards UI. We have reached the point of being able to test the new UI internally, so a public release is not far away.
We play Unleash every week, and you can join us for our play sessions. Next one is Tuesday the 28th of November at 17:00 / 5 PM (CET). Join us online for a multiplayer Unleash match!
If you want to see how we play, but cannot join the play session, you can watch gameplay videos without commentary through our Twitch profile. We live stream almost every session.
And remember… Monsters never come alone.