Mezzanine Stairs

One of my final tasks has been wrangling the more complex skill relationsips from later chapters into some sort of tree layout. I was saving this for last last not just because it’s tricky, but because it involves the gamepad—programming of which has taken longer than I expected.

My challenge was to design a layout that makes sense both visually and to directional naviagation, not to mention fitting everything into the menu. Also, I was determined to generate layouts programmatically since they evolve with each chapter.

Assuming some of the longer skill names wouldn’t fit side by side, I started off with an expanded version of the bulleted-list with one item per column, but managed to get everything to fit (in English, at least).

The skill lists became much taller, but at least we can now rely on scroll wheel support and eliminate the awkward page up / page down button workaround.

The Flash plug-in only supported scroll wheel inputs in certain situations, and would scroll the entire page rather than content in the player most of the time.

When was the last time you clicked on a scrollbar to use it rather than use a scroll wheel or swipe gesture?