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Radial menus

A lot of work this week, but you can't really see any of it.
I've been setting up the interface between the player and all the controls. Now I have a way of entering any kind of command I need in a way which is (IMHO) pretty easy to get to grips with.

Here's the early concept:

[radial menu with two levels]
This was my first concept, that you would use the radial menu to switch to a non-game state and from there you could use direction keys and space to set up various parts of the game.

But I thought it would be better if the radial menu could be expanded with multiple layers to handle things directly in game without entering a non-game state.

So now you can control the camera, perform actions and feats, give orders, switch characters, set default AI behavior and other things right in the game.

[8 level radial menu]

And all layers lead back to the main layer, so hopefully you can't get lost in the menus.

Some interactions though still need to enter a non-game state. For example organizing your inventory or resting and eating.

In that case you'll still be able to use the radial menu to exit back to the game. it will always be there.

The radial menu looks kind of crappy right now because it's just a placeholder. Later it'll have proper graphics and probably have special icons.

[like this]

For now I'm concentrating on getting a game that works, then making it look good later.

[Try to think around the problem]

A few days ago I was stuck with a big task to do and nothing small which I could work on until it was finished. These kind of bottlenecks in development are a real problem for me, since I don't get a lot of time for the project and it sucks to get half an hour but not be able to do anything. That's just not enough time to clear the bottleneck and it only confuses things to leave a task half completed.

Anyway, now the menu structure is in place there are a million ways in which I can move forward, many of them will take less than 30 minutes to do, so I can be more productive and less stressed by the project.

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