"Say 'hello' to my little friend!"

Scarface (1983)

One part of the gameplay is buying information for the raid. The key is to decide what info we need to get the most out of the location. Let's start with a quick example from the test level, the coin dealer.

Once we've bought the plans, we can buy detailed info on the swag:

• Coins [€5,000] → you'll get info about coins with a total value of €10,000
• Silver [€5,000] → you'll get info about silver with a total value of €10,000
• Art [€7,500] → you'll get info about art with a total value of €10,000
• Cash [€2,500] → you'll get info about cash with a total value of €10,000

Buying all that will cost you €20,000 and could result in a pay out of €35,000 after the job. But our selected fence won't take art, so it's €17,500 less. There's also info on alarms and doors and what not, each comes with a price tag, and we need to decide whether it is worth it or not.

All this to come to the point of this post:

How to show this info to the player?

At first, I wanted to show these infos on hover, "A" stands for alarm, but that info will be provided differently later.

Tooltips are a nice and easy way to show infos, but the obvious drawback is, that you need to move the mouse over the item. After toying with them, I decided to go with fixed labels - and only for elements that actually have info data to show.

"case_001" contains coins and is linked to the alarm, "case_002" contains art, "case_003" does not contain anything of value (you know of), but is linked to the alarm, too.

Adding labels is easier than adding the item's action menu (see here: Part 2), as we can simply draw the label's background (9-slice, again) and the icons during its draw event. If, and what to draw, is determined by the information you bought before starting the raid and the subject of another post.

With this in place, I'm going to add doors to the cast (and their "correct" action menu).

Laters ...