Who’s having a good Friday? You guys? Grand! And now you get to read a blog post!
So, this week I managed to publish my tutorial about creating menus for use with keyboards and gamepads. It shows two layouts for menu styles which can be controlled with the arrow keys, d-pad or analog stick.
I’m also working on a third menu project for that tutorial which will refactor the movement events to use functions etc, and hopefully work like a scrolling list. Think of the original inventory list in Pokemon Red and Blue.
The functionality will be the same, but it’ll be a bit tidier, seeing as I shouldn’t need to explain how it all works again. Which is the main reason I kept the events separate in the example projects. So, keep an eye out for that.
I’ve also made a bit of progress with my inventory tests. Now you can look through the first page of the inventory, and the item you have highlighted appears on the right-hand side along with a bit of information about the item.
The information for each item is stored in a JSON file, and every time we move the selector cursor, we update the inventory with a function. This function ensures that the cursor is in the right place, updates the variables to make sure the correct item is selected, and then sets the animations to show the correct item and pulls the relevant text from the JSON. You could do this with an array, but I’m more used to manipulating JSON files thanks to my dialogue system.
Next steps will be to make sure that the slots show the items they’ve got and to make sure you can change the inventory tabs. Then I’ll need to look at being able to add items to the inventory. Plus, I'll do a bit more work making it look nice - make sure the item images are the right size and aligned correctly etc. So, still plenty to do!
Have a good weekend guys, stay safe!