Menus are in business!

Menus are just about done, at long, long last. There are a few tweaks need making, and plenty of code that can be optimised and shuffled, but I'm finally happy with both the overall structure and functionality . Let's just hope when I implement something new I don't realise any more massive oversights. Urgh.

Anyway, let's summarise what I've put in. Where to begin!

At risk of incurring the wrath of 800x600ers, the screen has been extended to 898x450. The idea was I wanted to keep the map at full size, while displaying all the sort of info you'd normally have to go onto a pause screen to view. Hopefully this will make for faster gameplay than the standard JRPG format, while keeping lots of tasty statistics and menus in the mix.

The first box shows the items the player is stood on, as before. 

The next box is for objects near to the player. Different objects have to be closer than others before they appear here. Mushrooms, for example, can only be interacted with when stood on. Trees (which can no longer be walked over) can be interacted with when adjacent. The idea is that you'll be able to talk to NPCs or fight monsters without having to be physically on their square.

The third box is the inventory, fairly self-evident.

At the bottom is a message box, which doesn't have much interesting being passed to it yet, but eventually will be used for things like "monster hits player for X damage" and so forth.

The player can now toggle between moving on the map, and using the menus. If you press on one of the objects, a sub-menu pops up with options. At the moment the options allow you to get info displayed in the message box, and you can pick up and drop items, which appear in the pop-up box as relevant. You might notice the lion in the screenshot can be picked up - that was just for fun (I gathered up all the lions on the map and then released them to watch them scatter).

There'll be other menu/HUD elements coming such as skills, spells, stats, etc. I'm still thinking on how to fit them all on the screen, as it's kind of cluttered already.

As you can see, I also added lions in, with colour coding to show them as dangerous (the deer now show as a pale green). Lions were very quick to add, and reminded me how fun and easy adding new content is. However I'm trying to resist stuffing the game full of cool new stuff for now, because the more content I add, the more work it is to change things, which is why it's being kept to a minimum at the moment. I am getting bored of the same limited maps now though, so I might work on something a bit more fun next.