Been working on this very steadily over the past number of months even with everything going on.
https://twitter.com/Justin3009/status/1243720241076678662 - Options menu complete.
https://twitter.com/Justin3009/status/1247636892125990912 - Save/Load menu are complete.
https://twitter.com/Justin3009/status/1251504793782226944 - Added in a brand new menu where you can swap PCs appropriately.
https://twitter.com/Justin3009/status/1263534895890079744 - Inventory menu is complete.
https://twitter.com/Justin3009/status/1274410176431472646 - Equipment menu is complete.
https://twitter.com/Justin3009/status/1282069332630163464 - Artes menu is complete! Couple bugs to work out but otherwise it does work!
https://twitter.com/Justin3009/status/1289931650386681856 - New shop menu layout and updates.
There have been significant updates to things even after all of these such as:
1. The game now reloads ALL tiles it needs when leaving the menu!
* Downside to this is that it takes longer to leave the menu now, pretty much like most RPGs. Star Ocean, FF6, etc..
* Upside is that I have MASSIVE amounts of VRAM room to play with in the menus!
2. Save/Load game menu has proper state displaying when pressing "Select".
3. Button sprites were updated in the menus.
4. Inventory Menu for item names was completely redone so now it's much smoother and way more in-line with the game.
5. All menu text that's not prerendered now uses the same dictionary compression and DTE as the in-game dialogue.
* This cut down a TREMENDOUS amount of space consumption.
* All VWF text, including item names, menu names, etc.. use these methods of compression.
6. A clone/expansion of the original sprite loading function in the game to allow new graphics!
* This is being used currently for all menu buttons.
* Will be used later for all PC graphics and item graphics so they can be expanded upon.
I still have a couple menus to complete and bug fix still for the main game but they are JUST about done, FINALLY. After that, it's fixing up the Battle Menus and then it's onto bug testing! I temporarily introduced two extra 'reserve' slots for PCs that needs to be seriously watched. This was done so all 8 PC slots could be used at any time.
Brambard may be struck down to being an NPC for awhile until I can figure out exactly how I'm going to include him properly and when I can have him officially join the party. Still haven't worked on event editing yet so this may even be too much to handle but we'll see what happens.
There's probably more to report here but I'm kind of scatterbrained currently. Otherwise, yeah, lots of updates, lots of progress, things are looking good.