Creating a Custom Rabbit (Skills)

[Argo]

With these types of menus, I also proposed a design you might enjoy in my virtual pet games write up. The intention was to keep a simple menu interface, while still allowing for some nested menus and providing some depth to work with in UI. Essentially once a user scrolls onto the menu they would like to interact with, using the PTT could select that option, and rotating the device could act as a secondary input. Take a basic inventory menu for example. PTT might give a “simple” view of the item highlighted. It could expand the selected item to show a description and stats. Rotating the screen instead opens item options (equip, delete, craft, trade, sell, etc.)

@Argo

A big thing I wanted to add was some UI ideas I have. The r1 isn’t really intended for gaming, especially because we really only have a single button to use. This is one of the big restrictions we have to work around with the designing process. If we continue to avoid using the touch screen, we will have to find an analogue solution to this issue. With some creative menu choices, we can start to open how many options a user has to interact with the gameplay.

Once the user “opens” the game, I would expect the device to stay in this game mode until either: the user chooses an exit game button or the rabbit is reset (5 PTT presses, in the case of a failure in the program this avoids soft-locking users in “game mode”). Starting out, the users device is upright. I expect this to be some sort of pet selection menu, with a list of your owned pets to scroll through. You scroll with the scroll wheel, and select with the PTT button. We could start building multiple menu layers, but I would rather avoid layering too much and instead use one of the unique aspects of the device.

The r1 is square, no matter what way you hold it the overall form factor will remain the same. We can use the rotation of the device as a secondary menu select option. The PTT button could open a “stats” breakdown, and the rotation could transfer the player to a new screen. We can have 4 screens in total, each with their own menus or buttons to cycle through.

Screens 1,2, and 4 can be considered the standard “handheld” modes, while screen 3 can be reserved for more menu/setting intensive options. I say this mostly because screen 3 requires two rotations from the default position, which is quite awkward in standard use.