Today I started revamping the control scheme for Axion, the tactical RPG I am working on. I know the interface has problems as it is now, but I'm not sure how to make it work.
For now, the game may be thought as a poor man's Final Fantasy Tactics, except navigation on the map is done in the same way as a conventional RPG. Thus, there are a lot of menus. At least seven buttons are needed: four directional buttons, one to summon the main menu, one to interact with people and work through menus, and a cancel button. Any more would be confusing.
Today I also discovered Forum_Account's keyboard library, and it has been very useful. I am still finalizing which buttons do which task. Any suggestions? One thought I had was using Q, W, E, and the arrows, or Shift, Enter, and Backspace, or allowing several choices.
And what about the mouse? I could allow for clicking on menu choices rather than scrolling through menus, or allow both. Do you guys think that's a good idea?
Until I started doing my own programming, I never imagined that something as straightforward as intuitive menu navigation would be a challenge.
ID:885070
 Jul 22 2012, 10:12 pm
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Thanks for your comments. My concerns were a bit more elementary: simply a matter which buttons do what. I think that what you describe is more or less how my menus work.
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http://puu.sh/N4L3
My recommendation is to have a basic handler for each menu that holds the potential options in a list. Have an variable that holds your place in the list, and use that variable to display what option is currently highlighted and what option is used when the player hits the interact button.
With that, if you do it properly, navigating a menu becomes as easy as incrementing or decrementing the index variable, though make sure to check for an index below 1 and above the size of the list.