My next step was to work on the note and grimoire UI systems. Notes will be tied to game objects in the environment that can be interacted with to be read. The system I designed was simple. A UI with a blank Sprite 800×600 pixels in size, each note has a collider and OnMouseDown() function. When clicked and the player is within a certain distance, the Sprite stored in the note script is loaded into the UI and it tweens up on to screen. When the player presses M2 or leaves the vicinity of the note, it tweens back down and resets.
The grimoire system was a little more complex. The grimoire contains multiple “folds” with two pages displayed on each fold. There are buttons to load the previous and next fold onto the screen.
The folds contain buttons, each correlating to one of the potions that needs identifying. Once clicked, a dialogue menu will appear where the player selects an option from three categories. If the answer is correct, the entry corresponding to that button will be filled out, if not, nothing will happen and the player will be notified that they got the incorrect answer.
I will be replacing each of the buttons with images of the “objects” that they need to identify, and the entries will contain information on those objects and their significance to the story, as well as flavour text about their provenance.
The next step is to populate the play space with clues for the player to find, and to set up the structure of the game to allow the player to “complete” it and trigger events of some sort at progression points.