The "Equip" Menu, pt. 1

As promised on our Twitter feed, some of the first real in-game menus are going to be shown in this article. I was hoping to finish more in the past couple days so that I could create a video out of it, but there wasn't really enough content to justify such a thing.  So instead, below the cut you'll get to see a whole bunch of early menu concept art, in addition to screenshots of the real thing.

Updates - March 9th

Hey guys, long time no see.  I just wanted to give everyone an update on what I've been working on the past couple weeks, for those of you who don't follow the Twitter feed.  For about a week, maybe a week and a half, I was working on a tool to create graphical fonts, which I was hoping I could use and re-use beyond FaeSaga.  That tool is publicly available here.

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I've also been experimenting with a pixel shader to create windows for the various menus we have to utilize in-game, which didn't work out quite as hot.  That code will probably need to be retooled.

Also, I made a little HSV color dialog to see if I could wrap my head around the math.  One of the things I always wanted to do when I was younger was to write a really nice drawing app -- That will probably have to wait until after this project gets published (and I get a few more releases under my belt), but still, it was good coding exercise.

Finally, I've put some work into some of the new critical tools in the tool chain.  This is the first screenshot of the Decorator.  It's pretty basic right now.  What it does is allows us to place sprites where we want on the map.  In the near future I  hope to be able to script certain parts of the scenery with this tool, specifically doors, stairs, and treasure chests.   I'm in the process of refactoring out old Events code from NBTE into this tool.  Speaking of NBTE...

Several important pieces of missing functionality have been added to NBTE, making it almost (but not quite) feature-complete.  What's been added was the ability to move and delete layers (requiring some array juggling internally), the Line, Ellipse, and Fill tools, full Movement Permissions mode, and limited Undo support.  Refactored out of the code was all Events handling.  The toolbox was also made resizeable, to accommodate for more tools in the future.  Preliminary Template support and Commandline support was also added, as well as the ability to associate (*.nbm) files from the shell. 

Moving forward, I will continue to work on the Decorator, as well as the Enemy Pattern Editor, which the decorator tool will serve as a code template for.  I don't plan on smoothing out the rough edges on the Decorator, as long as it will work in our big toolchain.  The reason for this is because I want to move onto finally getting some real map and sprite assets designed for the game.

Until next time...