In Game Menus for RPGs

I'm going to be running ahead with the code again, a little this week, getting some of the menu stuff written out. Then I'll go back through it making it as simple as possible. The book won't create a full gui system as it would take up too much room, instead a lot of the positions and layout will be hard-coded (which, perhaps counter-intuitively, is a good thing, the layout code won't obscured by some opaque scene-graph, applying transforms to every element in a hierarchy, swarming with subtle bugs)

The above image shows a menu made up of panes, with the character panes heavily inspired by Final Fantasy 7. The same character is just displayed 3 times with a increased Y position. The MP, MP & XP bar are all working, the progress bar element is also something that was created in the previous chapter. The area under the Next Level will probably be used for status effects, but  I don't have any the moment (when I do this could be a good place to get some placeholder art http://game-icons.net/)

I want to add a GOLD/TIME piece of hud into the screen shot above. Then I want to start fleshing out some of the submenus.  

The problem with UI stuff is whatever you do, there tends to be a lot of code / data! But I'm going to try and keep it to a minimum.

If this post has caught your interest and you'd like to know more about the book I'm writing please check out the promo site here.