Interactive Map and Tool Bag

Last month I spoke about how how the player not having spanners on their person at all times was a big blocker for the demo. Well the game now has a tool bag that can be accessed at any point in the game.

The tool bag holds all of the players tools needed for assembling and disassembling any component of the truck, excluding the car jack - which can be stored on the truck.

The tool bag can be easily access by pressing the TAB key. Selecting any tool will equip it an close the bag.

Implementing this feature has already increased my enjoyment of exploring the world significantly, as I now don't ever have to worry about forgetting my tools when I find a scrap car. Art, it seems, imitates life (or draw from what you know).

New Local Map

I really didn't like the old map. I generally don't like much UI in my games, but with the procedurally generated worlds of Honcho, the player needs some navigation aid.

The original map was a means to an end. It was really ugly and really basic. So to piggy back off the new tool bag inventory, I decided it was time to redo the map to make it prettier and more diegetic.

 Old map, ugly, gross. I mean look at this thing. SmAlL InDiE GaMe guiz ass energy. 

As you can see above the old map sucked. And below, the new map is much nicer.

 New Map, hot, a stud. Doesn't need to hide when it smokes it's stogie. 

The clouds and other UI bits are courtesy of Ruta, who is doing a lot of the 2D art on the game. She still needs to do the map cover, as that's my placeholder art. So this feature is still in active development and will continue to improve.

There will be many more maps in the game. A new map for each region, and separate maps for each of the routes the player embarks on for delivery jobs / area traversal.

Every town and route within a region is procedurally generated, so I imagine this is a feature players will be using a lot to orient themselves. One aspect not shown in the video is the use of map markers and how they function. Placing markers helps players navigate in-environment, whilst avoiding us holding the players hand too much with a compass, breadcrumb trails, or objective markers and the like.

There's a balance between diegetic and usability here. There was a game called the Getaway on the Playstation 2 that had an interesting solution to navigation. It utilised the indicators on the players car to show which road they needed to take. The idea was great, but in practice usability had all sorts of issues. All this is to say, I'd like to be more "clever" with this stuff and experiment, but for playability sake, I'm trying to take a more established approach to this. I must be getting old.

Anyway, thanks for reading and your continued support. Still plenty to get done before the demo drops, but we're chipping away at it.

Cheers,

Greg

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