Dentin
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« Reply #2 on: March 04, 2009, 08:50:58 pm » |
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I was thinking about this, and I don't believe a dedicated newbie area is required. I think the reason they click around on the buttons and go all over the place is because nothing new or interesting happens. So, we make something interesting happen when they move.
On the first room in the quest area, there's nothing to do but move. When they go east, there's stuff on the ground, so we set the room to have 'get all' and 'wear all' buttons. When they enter the room, the buttons appear, when they leave, the buttons disappear. The next room has a candle, so it has only 'get all'.
When they get to Whelan, there's a 'talk' button, which talks to him. In the shops, there's 'list' buttons (I haven't figured out how to do more complex stuff yet), and at the trainers there's 'level', 'train', 'practice' etc buttons. I can also set things up so that if they're fighting, the buttons transition to a combat set.
The only problem with this is button space. At some point, I'm going to have to do the submenu thing like the Sims do. I may also just set up some dedicated informational buttons, for things like eq, inv, stat, score, spells, etc.
I have a rough idea of what it will look like right now. I think it will be more obvious what to do once the first pass of this is done and the dynamic buttons are at least halfway working. It should even require only minimal changes to the areas; just a handful of extra room strings. Things like shopkeepers and trainers should be workable in the code.
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