Day 8 with GameDevHQ

“A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays”

That is great for cats; but for us, we only get three. That is in the game of course. Today I started the User Interface section and who would have thought making images pop up on the screen would be so difficult!

It all started with the score. I do not usually like to keep tabs, but for this game it is about being the best. To do that we started to explore an empty object called “UI_Manager”, which has its own script. We also created a new text field and with that comes the canvas. For us to display a score that increases upon the death of the enemy, we had to navigate across three different scripts to get there. This is similar in difficulty to spawn manager, but I had an even more difficult time working through the challenges. I was searching within the deep portals of the web to find some answers. After about an hour of research, I decided perhaps this is beyond my scope of understanding so far. So, I put my pride aside and decided to watch the next video.

Come to find out, there was no possible way I would have understood what to do in this section. The information I found online was equally as complicated as the answer. Jumping between Player, enemy, and UImanager was confusing. Luckily, I took my time and circled back a few more times to gain a better understanding of this process.

Or so I had thought. Next part of the section was implementing lives. Using 4 different sprites, we created an array and assigned each to the number the sprite represents (0–3 lives). This part was not so bad; I almost had the entire challenge correct. Of course, I am always missing something.

In the next section we flashed “GAME OVER” after the player has died. Even after a full day of practice, I am still struggling through this challenge. I imagine I will have to practice a lot more before fully understanding the UI capabilities and necessary scripts.