Item descriptions now shown in pause menu
Posted: Sat Feb 21, 2026 11:48 am
Something people kept asking in Carrot Survivors and also several people brought up during the initial playtest for Iris Blade was that they wanted to know what the items they had did.
Took me a while but It's finally here!!
I almost had a bit of a dev-panic-attack when I realized the UI interaction system, which I've been making sure works nicely with controller and mouse/keyboard, wasn't supporting this use case well.
The issue was that I have this concept of an "UI interaction context", that I open and close. Widgets "sense" user interaction in the current context to grab input focus. The contexts are used so that if you have two different UI "things" trying to take input... say, your inventory and a confirmation popup, you can only interact with the widgets for the one on top: In this case the popup would take precendence.
That became an issue because the pause menu was on top of the inventory menu. But then I realized, this is exactly why I made the UI interaction system independent from the UI tree: I can have two completely independent UI trees, the one for the pause menu and the one for the inventory, but attach both to the same UI interaction context: Bam, problem solved.
One day I need to write about this UI system in more depth, I'm quite happy with how it's coming along
Took me a while but It's finally here!!
- item-pause-menu.gif (5.27 MiB) Viewed 205 times
The issue was that I have this concept of an "UI interaction context", that I open and close. Widgets "sense" user interaction in the current context to grab input focus. The contexts are used so that if you have two different UI "things" trying to take input... say, your inventory and a confirmation popup, you can only interact with the widgets for the one on top: In this case the popup would take precendence.
That became an issue because the pause menu was on top of the inventory menu. But then I realized, this is exactly why I made the UI interaction system independent from the UI tree: I can have two completely independent UI trees, the one for the pause menu and the one for the inventory, but attach both to the same UI interaction context: Bam, problem solved.
One day I need to write about this UI system in more depth, I'm quite happy with how it's coming along