Life continues to be crazy. I am getting a lot more done at work these days, but lots is going on in Overworldia too. My daughter Venus is growing up fast. 🙂
I’ve just gotten rid of the leftmost HUD in overworld, and replaced all text status with graphics. It’s getting much more compact. To do this, I had to reformat the inventory, add status like steed and poison to the health bar, and compress the compass key. The HUD inventory items are now clickable to use them. The level indicator has a meter which fills up and says how close you are to leveling.
More difficult and interesting will be removing all the events that guide you from the side. They are pretty much unnecessary for gameplay, but add a lot of atmosphere. I also want to add on-screen statuses to invisibility which I created a while back, including awareness, sleep, and stun. Then will be the interesting one of dialogue, I think might use a blank slate and actually have small scripted dialogues between characters for that one. Not sure yet.
Getting rid of the HUD is the first big step towards alpha, I’ll then feel comfortable people can arrive at the game in its intended form. A production environment and security will round that out. I still have years to go on content, graphics, infrastructure. Making games is fun!