Field UI highlights! (Patreon)

another quest done! once again, let's not talk about it!

instead, let's talk about something that has been in the back of my head for a while, but i didn't think it would actually be feasible to implement... until it was. this came up in the comments of cass's most recent dev blog post:

...and because that is looking very tiny, transcription: 

On 5/1/2021 at 10:58 AM, Pemseles said:

also the one thing i keep finding i miss in the game is a way to access the field notes in battle. i can see why this isnt a thing cuz youd have to add buttons to the ui and mayb its kinda the point you memorise the effects but im baby

Cass's Reply:

i like this.
i'm not sure i know how to do it...
but i like it.

so when this came up, we talked about maybe making the field notes accessible via a button, but... well, nobody really likes reading, right? ultimately the goal should be less reading. clearer information without having to read. not just shortcuts to reading.
and obviously with our complex field system, it's not going to be possible by a longshot to abolish reading entirely, but...

earlier in the year, cass had already spent a lot of time organizing field information into one better-collected part of the scripts. we didn't really have lofty ambitions for it at the time beyond cleaning things up for future ease of use, which i suppose was a hard success here.

perry had a vague idea of how to maybe make an idea i'd had before happen. and so it happened. aside from some data entry, it happened like way more easily and quickly, than either of us felt was frankly appropriate. 

anyway, you know how after fifth gen or whatever gamefreak babymode decided to put super effective indicators on the attack menu selection for everybody who didn't know the typing chart? 

well i still think that's silly. but field effects are a lot more complicated than the typing chart. so here we are:

please ignore the kyogre idk what ikaru is doing

cave field-- rock moves boosted. no need to remember. just click the glowing green move. 

these indicators specifically only show up when you're in possession of the Field Note item in game, so there's now a reason to collect them even if you're using an external guide still.

they also work for status moves and decreased moves!

please ignore the blatantly illegal moveset i just needed to demonstrate

this is far from a perfect solution to the huge burden of knowledge field effects pose, but thanks to a lot of work from cass and perry, it was a very practical improvement. we'll see what else we can do going forward too!