New interaction menu UI

[alberted]

Feature Summary
When pressing ESC, a UI menu will pop up, where you will be able to see and interact with your inventory using the mouse. The UI has a quick acces menu with the last few items you picked up, and a backpack with the rest of your items, sorted by resources, tools, and jelly items.

Goals

• The UI should be as easy and simple to understand and use as possible.
• You should only need to use the mouse to interact with the UI.

Feature Components
Backpack
When items enter the backpack they will be sorted by the categories resources, tools and jelly items. Resources are blocks, but also items like sticks.
Jelly items are any items related to jellies, like food and jelly dew. Tools are tools like pickaxes and shovels. Each category have a distinct icon.
When the UI is open, you can toggle the visibility of the backpack, by pressing the backpack button in the bottom left. It should be off by default.

Hand Slot
What item you put in the hand slot to the right of the backpack button, will determine what item you have equipped.

Quick Access Menu
The quick access menu is a small inventory menu that is placed above the backpack in the UI. It is always visible, even when the backpack is closed.
When you pick up an item it will first be placed in the quick access menu. When you replace an item in the hand slot, the replaced item will also go to the quick access menu. The menu is there so the player is able to easily access the last few items they picked up or used. When the menu is full, and you pick up another item/replace the item in the hand slot, the item that has been in the quick access menu for the longest will be moved down into the backpack, to make space for the new item.

The quick access menu can also be used a bit like a hotbar. You can use the number keys to quickly put items from the quick access action menu into your hand slot, even when you don't have the UI open. The item slots are numbered so the latest item that entered the menu corresponds to "1", the second to last corresponds to 2, and so on. That means that any time you press "1", the latest item that entered the quick access menu will be moved to the hand slot.

Example Visual
UI Concept


Item Flow Diagram


What should be manipulable in the unity editor

• For every item it should be possible to set what item type is it (meaning where it will be sorted in the backpack)
• You should be able the set the visible size of one inventory slot
• For every category of item in the backpack and the quick access menu, it should be possible to set how many inventory slots are available. If there are too many slots in a category to fit the UI, it should allow the user to scroll in the category, to see the rest of the items.

 

[RedEagle_P1]

Feedback:
1) Use something like language tool for official documentation spelling correction. Don't bother wasting your time with that for day-to-day posts and cards but official docs may benefit.

2) I am worried not equipping items when you pick them up will lead to confusion by the user. Often times we see people pick up berries only to get stuck because they can't use them on the jelly.
I suggest a system that gives each item a value and if the value is lower than what you have equipped, its stored, if its higher it takes over the primary slot.

So if berries are 1 and jellydue is 2, you would switch to jellydue when picking up jellydue. Also if berries are 1 and almonds are 1 when you pick up almonds, the almonds would take over the slot since they are not lower.

Tools could be 3 so you keep the tool when harvesting crops.