Subscreen

Well, now that the Starcraft 2 beta is closed (at least for a few weeks) it's time to get some more done.  I haven't done much since the last post.  Mostly it's been reworking UI bits.  I'm not a huge fan of the lack of buttons on the iphone/touch, but I guess everyone has to deal with that.   I've been working on getting some on-screen UI for health/control buttons/etc.

Tonight I finally also got the main inventory subscreen somewhat laid out, mostly similar to the gba version, but slightly different, since the font resolution is much higher.  I'll also need to add options to toggle to the map or enemy database, but that can come later.

The other thing I need to work on is the control scheme.  It will use a simple on-screen control pad, but in playing other iphone games to get ideas, I've noticed that some of them with control pads work well, and some of them are completely miserable to use.  A lot of it will be fine-tuning the hot spots, dimensions of the control areas, etc.  My friend Rob also made a suggestion that I think will really help -- if you hit the attack button, and there's nothing in front of your character, but there is something that could be hit if you had turned before attacking, it will auto-turn your character.  The part of me that likes crazy difficult games wants to fight against the idea, but I do think it would really help make up for the fact that it's REALLY hard to accurately control a character with a touch-screen control pad.  So good suggestion, Rob.  That's something I'll need to add in, maybe once I get the subscreens and menus working.