Hello, this is Ethan, writing my personal development blog for the Arcane Arcade team developing The Witch's Garden.
As the main UI programmer on The Witch's Garden, the largest user interface to tackle is the player's Reference book. Recently, I've been working on expanding the book UI, but first, let's talk about the basics.
Book Overlay Basics
The overlay menu is split into two halves that fit on each side of the screen. It is built to be modular so that one type of menu page can be set on one side and another type of menu page can be set on the other side. This allows us more flexibility with menu presets and how information is displayed.
Menu Focus System
The focus system allows the player to switch which menu they are navigating on a controller. When selecting slots in a menu and the player reaches the edge, it should switch the selector box to the menu next to it.
The focus system does a check if the menu is able to be focused on, otherwise it cancels the action. This code allows us to stitch whatever menus we wish to have together and be able to navigate through it smoothly with a controller.
Menu Backgrounds
After many iterations and updates to the overlay menu, it is finally time to add some more interesting backgrounds for each menu page. Before now, all menus were displaying with the default book background. This is no longer useful because other non-book menus will be pulled up by the player. For example, we want the shop counter sell screen to have a shop counter background, not the default book background. For example, we are going to set the buy background to look something like the chest that the player clicks to open the screen.
I'm going to continue working on polishing the UI over the next couple weeks. Thanks for reading.
Comments