I would share a screenshot today, but I doubt anyone wants to see more pictures of the menu development, since that’s not very exciting is it? Unfortunately for all of us, the menu system is probably more important than anything else the game engine has to handle, since it controls just about everything behind the scenes in an RPG like Shadowdawn. Properly handling inventory and equipment in a clean, easy to understand way is something a lot of games fail at and seriously underestimate. I’m not sure if the way I’m working on is the right way, but it’s a start, and once this game is in your hands, I’ll be able to learn what is good and bad about it for the next one.
That said, it’s taken me a few days longer than planned to finish programming the character status screen. I still have some artwork to create before it is properly implemented, such as the buff/debuff icons and the icons for weight and money, as well as the actual character art for Arashi and Ket (I’m still borrowing art from earlier game concepts for the most part as placeholders).
From here, later today I plan on finishing the other half of inventory management menus, the actual backpack screen, which hopefully won’t be as complex and is already half coded due to the needs of the status screen. The two menus are practically interchangeable when it comes to readied equipment, although they both have different overall purposes so they aren’t at all redundant (you’ll have to wait and see, I guess). Hopefully that won’t take very long, and I can focus on the Journal submenu, which is essentially an organized list of objectives with descriptive text. After that is the Options submenu which may be the last serious technical programming I have to do before going forward with level design. Options will make me despecify the controller and system settings as I’ve been using defaults since day one; on future projects I’ll know better that’s for sure.
This is the 40th actual day I have been working on this game. Shadowdawn is shaping up more and more, it’s only a matter of time before I can release a trailer. It may be hard to believe for those who have followed my work for so long, but this is it. I can actually see the end on the horizon.
