Controller UI
- nekiristailgame
- Mar 29, 2020
- 2 min read
Collin Diekvoss
When playing a game, the player wants to know what to do and when they can do it, and almost every game has button prompts for this, and Nikiri’s Tail is no different. Our target control scheme is an xbox controller, but given that our game is still a PC game, we have put effort into making the UI dynamic so that if the player is using a Keyboard and Mouse, the UI will reflect that and vise versa with a controller. We have borrowed influences from Breath of the Wild controller design where all 4 face buttons appear on the screen to help the player not have to look down at the controller to know where buttons are in relation to each other.
One obstacle that had to be overcome is that when multiple interaction options are available, for instance when the play is possessing the human character, they always have the option to dispossess, but when they are looking at a door to unlock it, 2 UI’s would be created because each object would create its own. For this UI we really needed what is known as a singleton, only one instance of it exists. I solved this by making all objects get their UI from the player controller, unfortunately sometimes the UI hadn’t been created yet, so in that case the object will create it, but then give ownership of that object to the player controller for all the other objects to consume.
Handling the Controller and Keyboard switching is fairly easy, whenever an input is detected that corresponds to a controller is entered, it sets a flag, and the same with the keyboard. Then in the UI, we can bind to that flag to determine if something is visible or not.
In a similar vein, instead of destroying the UI whenever there is nothing to show, we hide it when there is nothing to show, since destroying the singleton in any object would cause the rest of the UI to have to be recreated, which would be especially bad if there were multiple prompts to display.
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