It would be cool if Episode Portal had a “hot bar” feature. What is a hot bar you ask? Well a hot bar is like an items box or a button you can click at any time to pull up a menu. Think of Minecraft’s object bar that holds all your stuff in it, or a mystery game’s corner button that allows you to see all notes you’ve taken in the game thus far. Hot bars are useful in this way for making the game more interactive and fun for the player.
Despite the usefulness of hot bars I’m not asking Episode to make their own version of a menu bar and upload it to the portal, because really not everybody is going to want to use the same menu bar/ hot bar and the process of making it happen might take some time.
Instead, my suggestion is just to make things attachable to the camera, that way no matter what zone it goes to the chosen overlay will be in the exact same spot.
We already have the tappable overlay feature in the Portal. Only two things need to happen to be able to make this happen.
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Make it so the story can continue without tapping the overlay -possibly have two types of tappable overlays, one for choices, and one for options. The one for “options” would just be one that always remains tappable until deactivated and choices is the one we have now.
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Make overlays attachable to the camera, Make it so the overlay follows what the camera does. It doesn’t have to follow zooms or pans, just show up on the screen in the same place no matter which zone you’re in. This is so you don’t have to make a copy for each zone. If it is a tappable overlay it can be used as a menu bar, hint bar, object bar, etc. but even without being tappable, it could allow the creator to add visual effects or custom filters to as many scenes as they like. Like cracked glass, rain on the screen, fog, record sign, news line, etc.
I think this feature would be really nifty in customizing a story and making it seem more professional and engaging.
Thnks for reading