Devlog 10: Elijah Jackson: Where the animation at?

"Where the animation at?"

Elijah Jackson

06/06/2025

The UI:

This week, I wanted to take a break from adding pure, player facing gameplay features. As our game looks towards QA testing and the backend is improved to support networking, I wanted to turn my focus towards the game's UI. Priorly, the UI appeared very static with elements appearing and disappearing instantly. I began by making basic open animations for each of the game's menus.

After adding the open animation, I created the same for a closing animation. In premise, this seems simple but ended up being far more complicated than I had anticipated. When creating UI, I can have it play it's open animation as soon as it's created. This is because the UI is freshly constructed then added to the viewport fast enough for the player to see the whole animation. The biggest issue with making close animations is delaying the destruction/hiding of the UI widget until after the animation has finished. After debugging issues for a while, I found that you can add an event track to widget animations that allows code to be called during a widget animation.

With that event added, the menus now fully supported opening and closing animations. The final result looks like this:

The last bit of work that I finished this week was the finishing of both the UI and functionality of the weapon upgrades system. Now, the UI for upgrading a weapon is much more descriptive, with a new indicator for max level. I plan on adding an animation for when you actually upgrade your weapon in the future. The final result of the UI and functionality improvements for the weapon upgrades looks like this.

Next, I plan on getting back to more player facing features, as well as assisting with the networking backend. Our project is nearing QA Testing and needs to have a fully supported build to do that. Currently, I'm shifting focus to the replication of the game state which will allow the loss of the game for both players without causing a crash. After focusing a lot on visuals I'm definitely excited to get back to core functionality. Thank you all for reading!