Inventory & UI updates

New inventory screen

I found the old inventory menu to be extremely slow to navigate, and after a while it would become tedious having to click through numerous menus before finally finding the action I wanted. To fix this, I decided to completely re-work the way the player interacts with the UI, as well as revamp the inventory menu. As I promised yesterday, I've included some screenshots below, but please note that the UI layout needs polishing and may change before release.

This is the general inventory menu screen:

You can hover the mouse over any item to get a description and information. Please note that the descriptions are just placeholders!

The inventory at the bottom left of the screen shows your currently equipped items. Hovering over them will display a similar tooltip.

You can click on any of the items to progress to this screen, where you will be presented with all the options related to that item. Once you select an option, you are returned to the main inventory menu (the first picture), and the text at the top will update to give you a description of how you carried out the action.

A move towards the mouse

As I also said yesterday, I've decided to move towards a mouse-based system for UI interaction. The keyboard shortcuts still work, but not everything can be done with just a keyboard any more.

The reason I chose to do this is that I found myself being extremely limited by having to support every action on the keyboard. Before the inventory update, I was having to use keyboard shortcuts from 0-9 to support every single option. That meant that if you had 20 items in your inventory, and you wanted to select the last one, you had to press: 9 (next page) -> 9 (next page) -> 9 (next page) -> 4 (select item). While doing that, you had to scan every option to see if the item you wanted was on that page. This was, as I'm sure you'll agree, a terrible design, and I had to change it.

I know there are good solutions to keyboard-based inventory UI's (such as those found in many roguelikes), but I felt as though I could make the inventory so much more responsive and user-friendly if I decided to move to a mouse-based system. Every single action in the game can be accessed with just a mouse (except for typing in your name and save-game file names), so, as is often the requirement for games of this nature, you can still play one-handed.

Progress

UI

- Finished inventory menu revamp.

Misc.

- Fixed large bug with rendering clothing colours.

- Optimised clothing rendering.

- Fixed some tooltip bugs.

UI, gameflow & the week ahead

As mentioned yesterday, in today's post I'll briefly talk about the UI and game flow. Please note that even though this is going to be pretty close to how the game will appear in 0.1.0, I may make some minor changes between now and release day. In fact, as I was proof-reading this post, I noticed at least 2 minor UI elements that are definitely going to be changed.

UI

As promised, first I'll show you a couple of screenshots of the UI in action. The first screenshot shows the initial dialogue when you open your inventory. At the bottom left, your inventory is shown. The second screenshot shows the tooltip that appears when hovering over items in your inventory (the mouse isn't shown in the picture, but it's hovering over the Maid's dress icon).

As you can see in the UI's text panel, the game uses a choice selection system to progress from scene to scene. In the screenshots above, there are 4 choices you can make, each with a corresponding number. One of the core concepts in this engine is that every action must be accessible if the player is using only a mouse or only a keyboard. The choices can therefore be selected by pressing the corresponding number key on the keyboard, or by clicking on them. The information shown in the tooltip can be accessed by keyboard users by choosing "View equipped items"->"Examine your Maid's dress". In this way, the player can use whatever input device they prefer (or a mixture of both).

Game flow

As I was typing this up, I realised that the best way to show game flow would be to create a .webm or .gif. I'll do that some time this week, and talk more about how the game is played when I post them. For now, the very basic premise is as follows:

Move around the randomly-generated world map (to explore or to visit places).

• Chance for an encounter in each tile (different tiles have different encounters):
• Encounter results in combat. Resolve combat (and post-combat sex scenes).
• Encounter results in event (such as finding an item). Resolve event.
• Visit a place on the world map
• Each place has unique options that can lead to quests, combat, sex, or events.
• For now, places are a series of dialogue options. Interior maps will be implemented in a later release.

The week ahead

This week I'm going to:

Finish creating all 0.1.0 clothing and weapons, and polish related descriptions and dialogue.

Finish sex-related engine work and core scenes. (I'll describe how it all works soon.)

Apply final polish to combat-related engine work.

Complete all drafts related to the main story and all major quest chains.

Work on the list of bugs that have been accumulating over the past 3-4 weeks.