Radial Menus | Patreon Weekly #160

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new Shattered Secrets! In this one I’m sharing another concept I have in mind for a potential reworked Imp quest.

In this weekly I’m going to share some more detailed info on the final UI improvements I want to make for v1.3.0

Keybinds and Radial Menus

v1.3.0 is now in beta and is complete in terms of game content, but there’s still a few things I want to do for the interface.

I’m going to be making adjustments to the current keybind functionality to help both controller and keyboard users. These are relatively small adjustments, but should hopefully make some significant usability improvements:

• Add new bindings for radial menus for quickslots and inventory usage.
• Add bindings for scrolling up and down, likely they will share bindings with zooming in and out.
• Merge the ‘wait’ and ‘pickup item’ key binds to a single ‘current tile’ binding.
• Add several more default controller binds with the freed up space.

I do also want to eventually at keybinds for UI navigation (so the game could be played without a mouse), but that will come later.

The biggest part of the above changes will be the addition of radial menus. For mouse and controller users these menus will let a user access multiple potential items with a single binding plus a bit of quick pointer action. As an example, here’s a screenshot from Apex Legends, which uses radial menus extensively:

This would free up a ton of space for controller user bindings and should also make using items from the inventory much faster too.

Full UI Improvements

There are also some improvements I’d like to make to the newer full UI mode.

Firstly, I promised more detailed enemy info in the top-left of the screen a while ago and would like to finally get it implemented. This would replace the current danger indicator and would let players see more info about enemies at a glance, including active buffs/debuffs. This would probably also replace the boss health bar UI, as bosses might get a special flashier enemy info graphic instead. Here’s a proof of concept I made for this UI a little while ago, you could expect to see one of the in the top-left for each enemy on screen, up to some reasonably cap.

Secondly, I want to see about starting to expand some of the game’s interfaces to better take advantage of the extra space on the full UI mode. Most prominently, I think several game screens could have information moved out of popup menus and into the game interface proper. Examples of this include the changes screen, alchemy screen, rankings screen, hero select screen, and games in progress screen. For the sake of time I may end up doing these in a patch though, or in v1.4. I’ll likely also implement them incrementally, instead of all at once.