September 2, 2019
Tower Defense Tutorial Project
UI Text
GOAL:
Fix game over UI text and look into round text references to see why they update strangely.
NOTES:
For the GameOver screen producing weird text results, my first thought was to the check the inspector references. I know tying the stats into text UI elements uses inspector references, so making sure those were correct was the first check. Sure enough, it looked like the wrong text was dragged into the GameOver UI inspector field. I must have grabbed the wrong one initially, as the generic text was dragged in there as opposed to the text that should be holding the round number.
As for the issue with the round text timing being off, I figured that had to do with the way the coroutine to animate the text was setup. It should count up from 0 to the final round number the player ended on (whether they won or lost), but it was starting on that final round number, THEN going to 0 and counting back up again. This just looks really bad, so it needed fixed. From checking the RoundsSurvived script (which is the same for both the Rounds object in GameOver and LevelCompleted), it looked like the animation coroutine was being set to start, and the next line was setting the roundsText to the playerStats.rounds. This is most likely the issue, as the coroutine starts, the text is immediately set to the rounds value as dictated by the very next line, then the coroutine continues running updating the value until it hits the rounds value again. This fits inline with the incorrect behavior we are getting.
PROBLEM 1
The incorrect text being displayed on the GameOver UI.
TEST 1
Move the Rounds (Text) into the RoundsSurvived inspector field as opposed to the Text (text) for the GameOver screen.
SOLUTION: This was all it was, updating this fixed the issue and the text was all in the proper place on the GameOver UI.
PROBLEM 2
Round counting animation starts at the max value, then immediately goes to 0, THEN counts up to max value again.
TEST 1
I removed the line right after the one initializing the AnimateText coroutine that was setting the rounds text to the rounds value.
SOLUTION: This appeared to solve the issue with some testing. Both the GameOver and CompletedLevel UI would start the round counter at 0, then count up to the correct number of rounds survived.
NEXT STEP:
Make 5 uniquely distinct levels to test the overall system. This includes testing generic gameplay as well as the general level progression and level selection system. As I am using a basic built in Unity way to handle saving progression right now, I have had all the levels unlocked for recent testing. I need to reset that and test that that is tracked properly, especially over several levels to make sure the system holds that many as well as giving more data points for any possible issues.