Journal Entry 8

Date: 22.5.

Invested hours: 1:15

Activity: finishing up the help section of the menu, minor cleanup

Notes: I find it really annoying that in order to display something on the UI layer, you have to change Transform to RectTransform, Spriterenderer to Image and TextMeshPro to TextMeshProUI and manually (at least, I don't know of a way to do it automatically) copy the sprite, color, etc. This makes it so that the in-game element and the UI element can't share the same prefab, even if they display the same thing. This was an issue when I was creating a page in the help menu, and I wanted to put the sprites of the enemies and obstacles next to their descriptions. If I changed the enemy design now, I would have to go to the UI menu and make the same changes again!

Something I forgot to mention yesterday: the edge-of-screen message bubble for villagers talking while out of screen is pretty nice, but making it involved a lot of Vector2 arithmetic (again), at least there is the Camera.ViewportToScreenPoint function. It works well enough, but it could be made better if it was closer to the screen edge in the corners - because a normalized vector is normalized to a circle, but the camera view is rectangular! It would require scripting a function to normalize vectors according to the Chebyshev metric, probably.

Outcome: final project C build uploaded