UI Foundations Laid

Overview

This week was primarily focused on adding basic UI elements, working on Exoframe movement, and adding initial game sounds.

For now I am using VERY basic art assets while I focus on core game mechanics, so be prepared for some crappy looking art that definitively proves that I am not an artist.

Overall this week was not too bad in terms of the timeline.

Fleshing Out The UI

Exofactory is being written in Bevy, and while it has been quite enjoyable overall I must say that the UI developer experience is absolutely not fun. Future Bevy is supposed to address this, and for the sake of Rust game devs everywhere I hope they do. While the UI for the main menu and settings are in a good spot the core game itself till this week has seen no work.

This week, that changed with the addition of the main top bar. This bar is intended to be the goto place that players use to get a sense of what “mode” they are in what is going on a global level.

Secondly this week I laid down the framework for building detail/setting windows. This enables me to quickly iterate and reduce the amount of UI work as new buildings are introduced. For now all clicking on a building does is bring up some basic info as shown above.

Overall happy with things here.

Experiment With Sound

As a break from all the UI work I added some basic sounds to the game. After a bit of recording and tinkering in Tenacity I have a few sounds I am happy with. For example the menu mouse over I find quite nice.

I still need to add a sound section to the settings menu, but that can wait for now.

Exoframe Motion

Lastly I added exofame motion. It’s very snappy and satisfying to say the least. The motion and physics system in general is handled by the excellent rapier library.

Conclusion

Bottom line, I am happy with this week. I aim to release weekly dev blogs and monthly video blogs, so keep an eye out.