Minimap
The minimap is a minature representation of the game area surrounding the player. It shows a zoomed-out version of the main camera, which allows players to see the a wider picture of the game map. The minimap is located at the bottom left corner of the main game screen. The minimap is to be used in conjunction with the fog effect. Since the fog effect will limit the players ability to see their surrounding area, the minimap will assist them to navigate the game map whilst maintaining the mysterious effect of the fog.
During sprint 3, our team has encountered many technical difficulties whilst implementating the minimap feature. We had trouble loading assets onto both the minimap and the main game area. The assets only loads in either one of them. This is shown in the visual representations section below.
Half way through implementation, there had been many changes in the main branch as to how the room generation and map renderering works. Our initial implementation mentioned above no longer works the same, the position of the minimap cannot be pinned to the bottom left but instead pinned at the player position. Our team has tried hard to fix this issue, however, as of the end of sprint 3, no solution has been discovered yet. This can be seen in the visual representations section below. We are going to continue to fix and implement the minimap feature in sprint 4. The major challeneges are to fix the position of the minimap to the bopttom left corner and to load assets into the minimap as well.
-
TerrainComponent: This component is responsible for rendering the TiledMap of the main game. We have modified this class to also render the minimap. -
Floor: This component creates the floors of the game area and spawns in the player. It also sets the camera for the floors. We have modified this class to also set the orthogonal camera for the minimap. -
MainGameScreen: This component loads in all the components for the main game screen. We have modified this class to load in the minimap. This is where we set the position and resize the minimap.
The minimap will automatically be shown on the bottom left corner of the main game screen. The position of the player will be shown in the minimap. Users can use it to assist their navigation of the game map.
Although our minimap feature requires further modifications and refinements, we have conducted users tests for our initial and current implementations. Here are some of the key takeaways for both versions:
- It would be more useful to see some of the assets of the map and the player position within the minimap.
- The minimap is underneath the game area, sometimes cannot see the minimap.
- The minimap can make the game bit too easy to navigate, I don't think it's needed when the map is so small.
- There should be a frame surrounding the minimap to differentiate from the game area.
- The minimap is positioned in a weird position for the current implementation.
Based on these feedbacks, we will make future changes to address the problems identified by users and introduce new features and design elements for the minimap.
Originally, there we're plans for the minimap to be similar to minimaps in rouge like games, such as the Binding of Isaac. These types of minimaps display the rooms the player has been in, in a blocky way of presenting the area.
However we had come across issues in this approach, given that the studio had voted for a random generation of the map. Therefore, room sizes would vary, and would be misleading for players if we reused the same room size in the minimap. As initially, a plan of making a table to colour each cell to represent the rooms the player has been, the larger amount of cells would be more accurate for room size. However colouring hundreds of cells was challenging, with connecting the rooms together would be just as hard. Therefore we had changed plans to show the original map, but smaller and in the corner. This option would still present the rooms, and provide more information to users on the wall specifics etc.
In the next sprint, we will continue to implement this minimap feature. The most important changes will be to position the minimap at the bottom left corner, overlaying the main game area.
We will also work on loading the assets onto the minimap as well, so that both the main game area and the minimap will have assets load.
Depending of the feedback of user testing, we might add the feature of disabling/enabling the minimap through settings, so that users can choose whether to have a minimap.
In the final sprint, we have decided to remove the minimap feature from the game based on a variety of reason, which are mentioned in the User Testing done for its necessity in the game. A large majority of users mentioned how a minimap wasn't the most useful feature to have in the game, given that the map is fairly small, as well as being counter productive to the other feature of a fog. The studio had voted for a more thriller like horror game, where the house would be dark and users would fear not getting to bed in time.