L Win Menu - RH

"L Win Menu"

Author: Ryan Hewitt

Posted on 8/29/2024

This week, the biggest undertaking was creating the Win Menu that displays some important information upon beating a level. The key info that needs to be given to the player in this menu is the current time you just got when beating this level along with the corresponding medal, the best time you have on this level, then a way to see how many of the four medals you have earned as well as their time requirement. There is a lot of stuff that needs to be displayed in a single menu so it was a challenge trying to fit everything, organize in a coherent way, and code the functionality to make it all work.

Firstly, organizing the menu so that all the elements fit compactly and evenly in the small window called for lots of different panels. Layers upon layers of Grid Panels and Vertical Boxes were used to put everything together. The hierarchy looks like a mess, but I am happy with the end product. There is also the issue of designing the menu in such a way that all the necessary information can be conveyed. I chose to put the four medals you can earn on the right half of the window, lowering the opacity of the image to show that you have not yet earned the medal, as well as displaying the time required to earn the medal below. There is also green text saying "New Best" that is perfectly overlayed on top of the normal black text that just says "Best" which is only displayed when your current time is better than your best time. 

The most difficult issue was of course the issue of programming it all to actually work. The editing of the text and images are simple enough, but quite a lot went into displaying the times required for the medals. Above is a screenshot of the MainGameInstance blueprint which contains a map of the Game Levels with the key being the name of the level and the value being a struct of level data. This is where the times required for each medal is determined. The Best time and medal variables are also set and would be saved through here once the save system is up and running. The times are all stored as floats and converted into the timer format with some string manipulation. Then voilà, we have the working Win Menu.