I Made A Dungeon!

by Hedgemistress
Rogue-like action! Child-like graphics!
ID:1826058
 
It's probably going to be a few days or even next weekend before I host again, as the new interface is kind of an intermediate stage and so it's not as playable as it should be, and I've kind of got to focus more on other stuff for a bit.

But I have been migrating things away from the statpanels in favor of a more integrated approach that lets you do almost everything with the keyboard, if desired. (Slightly for the old school retro thing, but also since it uses a two-hand control style for moving and attacking.)



Here's a brief glimpse of how it looks. I've replaced the "number keys for items, Fn keys for magic" as even testing it myself I found I kept unequipping my weapons while trying to cast spells and vice versa. Now number keys are used to interact with whichever menu is active (the backlit one) and tab flips between them. You can create a palette of things you want to access at all times using the hotbar at the top and the Fn keys. Drag-and-drop works on the hotbar, but there are also keyboard shortcuts for assigning or clearing a slot.

The square brackets around the number in the spells menu shows that it's an active keyboard shortcut. If I had tabbed back to inventory before taking the screenshot, the brackets would have relocated. The second spell, levitation, is struck out because it's been used up and has to cooldown. Note that while the other items in both lists are active objects, the spent spell is just dead text.
You cannot interact with an expended spell in any way until it cools down. It can't be removed from the hotbar, can't be put lower down in your list.

Related: I've decided to drop the idea of a hard limit of 10 items at a time, and the similar limit for spells (though your level limits spells at a harsher rate than that, at least at first). The item limit will still probably be fairly low, just less punitive than 10. I'm thinking maybe 24 initially. I'm thinking I'll keep the sidebar menus only listing the first 10, forcing you to open a backpack or spellbook in a separate pane/screen in order to rearrange things.

The panel above the inventory one in the screenshot is what I call the "view menu". It shows the item you're currently looking at/interacting with, along with descriptive output and then a list of numbered actions. When you're not looking at anything, it will give you a description of the room and generic actions like rest, search, et cetera. When I'm far enough along in the interface to ditch the statpanel entirely, this will actually be moved elsewhere, and the three panels on the side of the screen will be items, magic, and skills.

Interacting with the room as a whole is a work in progress, and is going to replace the current system I'm using where turfs are clickable/lookable objects in and of themselves, which makes it hard to target small or moving characters/objects and difficult and tedious to implement a cycle-through-visible-objects function.

The computer generated descriptions of rooms aren't going to be very elaborately detailed, but this is something that people who are making their own maps (or customizing a generated one) can take advantage of in order to tell a story or create an "adventure module". The ability to script new actions for a room is something I'd like to add down the line.
Also note that the spell icon won't be a giant white orb forever. That's a placeholder so I could test the mouse-foo.
You should remove the sword and shield. Super Meat Boy has no need for such petty weapons.