Hopefully, you can appreciate by the end of this chapter how even a simple map-like interface has its own flavors and complexities, but there is so much more you could do to enhance this area. Depending on your style of game, the player could spend quite a lot of time on the map exploring (such as Zelda) or they could just be zipping through. So, plan time accordingly to decide how much you want to invest.
If you target mobile platforms, then other input strategies are very important. On handheld devices, if players use the keyboard, they generally lose over half the screen. So, all they have is touch input. Similarly, on consoles and PCs, they don't have touch input, only keyboards or mice and gamepads. Input is a big area, but we will revisit this area in Chapter 12, Deployment and Beyond.
In this chapter, we covered the following topics:
- Building the wider world using textures, texture generation tools, map tools, and some hints at procedural generation
- The different UI interactions and marshaling input priority between GUI and game
- Adding smoothing techniques to scene transitions and how to use animated curves in places other than animation
- Adding some smooth transitions between scenes