I talked about it previously, laying out the UI elements and deciding where everything's going to go. Today I dove into actually building two major UI elements, the Debug Overlay and the HUD Prefab. They're both still preliminary and will be improved over time, but they're necessary pieces for in-game feedback on systems that I'll be working on next. I dove in without wanting to work on any actual scripting, but Gemini had other ideas. I had to explain that I wasn't coding anything and I wouldn't need to prompt another chat for this.

So, I started with the easiest, the Debug Overlay. Just a few simple elements, an input box for commands, a button to submit with a couple others I'll define later, and an area for feedback, such as the game's state and a log of debug messages. I did have some issues getting everything looking right (throughout this whole thing). Gemini hasn't been very good at using the appropriate terms in relation to the version of Godot I'm using. Eventually, I got something workable made though.

After that, I moved on to the HUD Prefab, which was going to consist of a bunch of different "zones" that I'd previously defined with the help of Gemini. Of course, when I asked it to recall the specifics of that conversation, it couldn't. Luckily, I was smart enough to lay it all out in the linked post.

I started with some containers anchored to the identified positions and worked my way through filling each in that I wanted to get going. As before, I ran into real issues getting everything to actually show up on the screen in the manner I expected. UI Elements in Godot are so much harder to work with than Unity. They just don't seem to work in an intuitive way. And don't get me started on having to manually specify minimum sizes and stuff. It shouldn't be as hard as it is.

But in the end, I've now got a display setup for the player's stats such as money, health, energy, and hunger. I've got an in-game time display. A central message display for important hints and clues. As well as placeholders for all the rest of the UI I'll need to build. It's a start, and a big step forward in preparing for tomorrow, where I begin making some of these systems actually work, then update this preliminary UI. And after that comes other bigger and better things like an actual save and load functionality.

I'm excited for what's to come, I hope you are too!