Added a menu system and a journal/quest tracking system.

Download this week’s Geas alpha!

Hit Esc to open the menu. Cancel (Z) will close any open menu. Use Confirm (X) to confirm choices and to examine/check/talk to things. Eventually these will be configurable but I hope it’s not too arduous to use this layout for now.

---

Discussion

There are a few graphical glitches in there (the background when you have the journal open, for instance). I tossed in a dumb effect when the main menu is open just to see how well it worked (it worked just fine). Watch the background and you’ll see it sort of start to blur and distort.

Anyway I’m fairly fond of the menu system. Distinct menus are defined as .menu files in res/menus, which are actually just Lua files that return a table. The table is used as a blueprint in constructing the menus. It’s fairly flexible and I like how it works. Which is good (since I built it and I am going to have to use it or replace it)!

Since I’ve gone ahead and built the menu system using the current, in-place object prototype version of the code, I’ll probably end up sticking with it. I don’t especially want to go back and fix everything at the end. But hey, maybe I’ll want to when I get to that point.

That said, I’m still not sure what I plan to do with vkLua in the long run. I guess I’ll figure it out once I’ve put more time into Geas and the library is more mature. I’ll try not to worry about it right now because no matter what I do there will be plenty of refactoring and code cleaning to do later. I can decide then whether I want to turn it loose onto the general Verge populace or direct people to use something else.

Last but not least, if you happen to only read my site because you come here via Twitter updates or something like that, then you should really check out the main Gruedorf page. There is some quality stuff happening there right now, so you’ll be missing out if you don’t take a look.