Hey all! We've made some pretty notable progress on updating the Glossary, the massive repository of information that can be accessed at any time. The screenshots I'll be sharing this week have been taken while the Glossary is in a state of 'not quite working right now', so while the layout is done it doesn't quite connect to the battle scene just yet. That will be the next step after making any further adjustments to overall layout, and then we'll get to add nice animations for opening, closing and navigating the Glossary.
The first major change from the old Glossary is the introduction of a new landing screen. Previously, the glossary would open straight into a contents view which you would be able to scroll up and down through, but now we start on a simpler page with eight options to choose from. Most glossary entries will be sorted into the first five categories: Guide, Classes, Tiles, Items and World. The Skill Index and Status Index will provide A-Z lists of all skills or statuses in the game for quick navigation and reference, while the Recent category will provide a list of all entries that were recently made available.
Upon selecting a category, we navigate to a view more reminiscent of the previous Glossary. We've adjusted the proportions and layout of the Glossary to be less overwhelming, and provided quick navigation buttons to other categories. Additionally, different entries might have slightly different layouts, such as statuses displaying their icons.
Now, for the elephant in the room, I am aware that we have maybe three total unique assets in use here. If you didn't think we were overusing the blue gradient box asset before, then this should make it more clear than ever. We'll be spending some time in the near future diversifying our UI assets, so you can expect the design to change a bit once we've done that. Layout-wise, I'm pretty happy with how it looks, but it's definitely in need of some visual variety.
That's all I've got for this week, though. Next time I show off the Glossary, it should be fully integrated into the game and have a greater variety of assets, so look forward to that! When it happens.
Also, one quick announcement: Team Whirlwind unfortunately won't be exhibiting at AVCon this year. We're very behind on some of our goals (which I probably don't need to say) and decided that our time would be better spent working towards those instead of creating a new demo and doing all the fun preparation required for that and AVCon. Hopefully the beta will make up for that, so we're working full speed on everything needed to get there. Thanks as always for your support, and I'll keep you updated on that front!