Starting this one mostly to mentally sort some ideas.
The current “dilemma” of sorts is mainly related to what sort of area the move buttons should have. This is also itself related to the fact that I want to make something that I can reuse with the other menus.
Let’s start with a baseline though.
You might recognize the yellow square as the one we used as placeholder for the Look screen way back when. Since all the menus have the same proportions but just change where the empty corner is.
Now, not this one, but the sidebars are meant to have “tabs”, meaning that we need to add some bleeding space.
The current area is 1060×885. Let’s see what we’re left with by resizing it to 1010×843.
Yeah, this works. For reference, that means we have sections of 270 x 237 to work with for the tabs and whatnot.
Actually, fuck that. Let’s round it down to 1010×840, meaning the remaining area is 270×240.
Now I can explain the dilemma at hand.
Even if it doesn’t have the tabs, the design of the Move menu needs to be useable in the other menus, as much for code efficiency as for visual consistency. This includes a hypothetical post-game glossary where you can check everything you collected while playing.
Our current area can be divided neatly into a 4×5 grid. And while 20 items per category is likely more than you’ll see in a single chapter and there’s an argument that can be made for creative limitations (as well as just player legibility in general), this is more a matter of flexibility and futureproofing.
So I adjusted it to instead be something like this: a 720px tall 3×5 grid and a strip that’s 120px tall.
The upper grid will have icons for each element while the strip will house a set of arrows that only appears when the items exceed 15.
Something to remember is that there’s gonna be bleeding and the like, so the space is not exactly the one that shows up in the image.
Now that I think about it, that design will be needed for the save files anyways.
We’ll go through that on the next one.