Devlog July 24th - Remaining menus

Welcome to the second devlog of July!

This time we're continuing with menus. First off, we have improved and expanded the menu for key bindings. This is the menu where the player can change what keyboard keys are bound to which actions in the game.

Similar to last devlog, let's look at before and after images so we can compare.

This is how the menu looked before

Every line represents and action in the game and the menu shows which keys that action is currently bound to. Clicking that button will allow the player to change the key. There is also a Reset button which resets the binding back to the default key.

The menu worked well enough, but it looked very basic and didn't fit the aesthetic of the rest of the game.

New and improved menu

We have updated the menu's look to match the rest of the game. But we have also added a large number of key bindings and we have improved the way we handle the keys.

We now have grouped the keys into a few groupings: Global keys, Exploration, Dialogue and Combat. 

This allows us to handle duplicate keys in a better way. It is now possible to assign the same key to different actions as long as they are in different groupings. So for example, we can use the arrow keys to move while exploring. But in combat, we use the same keys to control the camera.

This way, we can help the player to prevent assigning duplicate keys in a way that would break the game, but allow duplicate keys in cases where it would not cause a conflict.

Another new feature on this menu is the Display localised key names button. A lot of keyboards have different layouts based on your location, with special characters or some keys switched around. This setting is intended to help players with those keyboards.

Let's move on to the menu for saving and loading.

This is the old menu.
The list on the left is all the savegames we have created while working on the game.

This menu shows a list of savegames on the left. Once the players selects one, they can choose to load it or save on top of it, overwriting the old savegame. They can also delete the savegame entirely.

"multiple party members" is the name of the savegame, probably because we were testing something related to that when we created that savegame.

The main functionality of this menu haven't changed, but the look has been improved and we also display information about which characters are in the party and what their level is.

The idea is that this will help the player remember and differentiate the different savegames. 

Of course all buttons in both of these new menus will be scaled larger or smaller if the player chooses to adjust the UI scale in the settings menu, which we showed off in the last devlog.

With this, our work on menus is done! This is an important step on the road to finishing the game. It's starting to feel a little less like a work-in-progress project.

That's all we have for this devlog. Thanks for reading!

Next devlog will be the second friday in August, i.e. August 14th. Talk to you then!