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More UI concepts.

I've been doing some coding, nothing to show right now, but it's essential stuff. You know, the stuff that doesn't show up right away in game, but lays the ground work for actually being able to do stuff like attack and pick things up...

As part of that I'm still working towards a working concept for the UI.



There's the portrait (1) which tells you which character this is. Next (2) is the stats. Simple outline here, you can get more info by clicking on the portrait, but here you can see health, focus, fatigue and experience. Here (3) is the action buttons. These are contextual and change depending on character or target situations.

The target window (4) is an important one. this could be a monster, or it could be some gear on the floor, or a door or another player. You can click here to get more info about it. The available actions will change depending on the type of target.

Because you can have multiple characters selected at any one time, I need a way of making actions individual to a single character. I don't want all characters to open the door at the same time, or attack the same monster all at the same time. Actions are going to be staggered via the action manager (more on this concept later), and although you can select multiple characters for movement (for convenience sake) you can only do actions with one at a time.

I'm going to be testing this and seeing if it's a comfortable way of playing. It's kind of like a radial menu, but always there. I hope it makes the turn based system I'm using easy to adapt to. This isn't a real time action RPG, but neither is it a grid based, one square per turn movement game like most roguelikes. You can make multiple actions per turn, but doing so increases your fatigue levels. If your fatigue bar fills up you're going to start losing focus, and that makes doing actions such as fighting, avoiding damage or casting spells more difficult. The aim is to create a flexible turn based system, where it's up to the player how much they want to try to do in a turn. Do you go all out and try to win an encounter in a couple of frantic and dangerous turns, or settle in for a long, slow, safe battle?

Some things I'm thinking of changing:

Actions may become icons rather than text.
There may be just one character bar at the bottom of the screen, and portraits at the top. You can select the current active player by clicking their portrait. While selecting multiple agents for movement the action bar disappears or becomes empty.

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