GUI: Inventory, Equipment and Pause screens

More GUI updates for this month, focussing mainly on in-game screens and overlays. The overarching theme is to be able to navigate the menus with a controller, as well as a keyboard/mouse combo; none should be a second-class citizen.

Inventory menu

There is now a prototype of the inventory menu implemented. It has the following features:

• The items are presented in a table format, with the different items as the rows, and the icon, name and a few properties (e.g. type, weight, value) as the columns.

• Items can be sorted in ascending/descending order with regards to any of the columns

• Selecting an item brings up a context-menu with available interactions with said item (equip, drop, use, etc)

• We can filter items by category; different categories are shown in different tabs.

• We can also filter items by contained text; there's a textbox where the player can enter part of an item's name, and the items will be filtered to only show items containing that part.

• There's an indication for items that are currently equipped: "[E]" next to their name

The choice of fonts and font sizes are still work in progress, in order to be more consistent with other menus

Equipment menu

There is now a prototype of the equipment menu implemented as well. It is quite minimal: it is simply a listing of each equipment slot (shown as an icon) followed by the equipped item name and icon, if something is equipped. Selecting a slot opens up a context menu that shows other equippable items for that slot, and a button for unequipping. That's it!

Pause screen (softly fading in/out)

The quintessential pause screen is also implemented in a simple way, by tinting the game background and providing a few standard options like Resume, Load and Quit. To avoid making the tinting very sudden, the menu is faded in and out smoothly. Pressing "Load" brings us to the "continue" or "load" screen, whereas presssing "quit" brings us back to the main menu.

Functioning continue screen

The continue/load screen is identical to last time, but now it is quite functional rather than being in concept stage. Shown in the Pause screen video above!

Improvements in overworld/level screens : HP/MP bar animations

When the player gains/loses health, mana or experience, the associated bars fill smoothly rather than abruptly.

Dynamic UI tests

Multiple scales will be available for the UI, for increased accessibility under different game resolutions and screens. I have started experimenting with a few ways to deal with that, but this needs quite a bit more work.

Jungle biome

This was a simple asset replacement, as the jungle biome did not use a jungle-looking vegetation sprite for the bulk of the map representations. Now, this has changed to a dark looking palm tree. More assets will eventually come! This biome is briefly shown in the equipment and inventory videos above.

Until next time!