This has been a pretty busy week for us as we've been constructing some of the systems that the player can interact with outside of the Abyss. These systems include the Shop and Journal menus the player can access from within the Sothoth Inn. At the moment, their a little bare-bones, but the basic functionality is pretty much where we'd like it. I was responsible for designing the layout of these menus and scripting a bit of how they might work in terms of scrolling through and selecting items. And it's supposed to just be that simple, the player interacts with the Shopkeep character and is instantly presented with this menu that they can peruse.

The Inventory menu works identically, but is activated when the player interacts with the journal object on the table in their room. This menu is split into two "tabs," one for the items the player has collected in their playthroughs, where it would list some information about and the effects of the items along with an icon of the sprite image that appears in the game world. This list will increase in size with the more the player ends up discovering. Our initial ideas consisted of grid-like menus (akin to Mincraft inventories) but opted for a scrollable list, where items are not actually grayed out at the bottom or anything, so there is no allusion to the exact amount of items that are actually present in the game.

The lore tab works the same but serves a much different purpose within the game world. Throughout her journies, Grace will acquire one-off journal pages that will include some background or story information about the world and Abyss, the enemies, and specific events. Hard narrative elements are often scarce or void completely in roguelike titles so these are meant to be small snippets to fill the player in on more of what has happened in Grace's life, how she has ended up where she is now, and her current goals and thoughts.

While maybe not the most intriguing graphics and examples I could post this week, I'm excited to have some of these core systems finally starting to come to life. Stay tuned for some even bigger changes to come in the next two weeks!