Asylum – Dev Diary 11 : Little Tweaks 2

Today’s development time was severely limited due to other factors. So all I’ve been able to achieve is a little preparation work for the inventory system. I was trying to come up with a method that would allow the inventory items to also display a few action icons (examine, use, etc). I think I’ve found the perfect solution. If you cast you eye back to the previous inventory screen shot (shown below) you’ll see that the inventory items name is displayed to the left of the icon (when hovered over with the mouse). Now my plan is to move the item title up a bit and then to place the action icons underneath.

I can then adjust the mouse detection so that when the inventory item is no where near the mouse it just shows the object sprite, when the mouse enters the sprites bounding box the object title and icons show and the mouse detection is altered to include that area as well. This allows the action icons to remain on screen when the mouse is outside of the object sprite but inside the action area. All this is done, but I now need to sort out the interaction; that is what happens when the mouse is clicked. The first part of this will be the examine item, which is also important for the first few puzzles.