It has been literally a full week since I’ve posted an update and tho I wouldn’t say that I owe an explanation for that, there certainly is one. See, a lot of people juggle time management, balancing work and play and code and life. I am no different, obviously, but this past week has been one of those weeks when a lot of other things have sidelined the code-writing and the pixel-art-making and the usual hunkering down in the basement turning my sweat and tears into a silly little video game.
I won’t go into details, but school and such account for most of it, and while as of yesterday I pushed through and submitted the last of a short list of assignments, to say I’ve dived headlong back into code would be slightly inaccurate, too.
But then the whole thing seems strange at this stage because even though I haven’t been able to spend nearly as much time as I may like on actually writing code, I also seem to have come to the part of this development project where two things are true:
1) what’s really slogging my progress is my ability to generate art, and
2) most of the progress I am making is expanding and duplicating features.
The first of those two statements seems pretty self-explanatory, right? I write some code for a player inventory and then I need to make art for the two hundred things that go in that inventory. I add a toolbelt, and now I need to draw all the tools. I added the ability to add decorative and interactive objects into playing field and now I need to draw dozens and dozens of interesting objects that might realistically populate the floor of a grocery store. My bottleneck there is art output, and I’m not an artist who has ever really been about volume production, so it all takes some mental shifting.
The second statement is a little more vague, perhaps? I mean, the whole effort here has always been expanding features, incrementally adding functionality to the game world.
And yet, for a very long time that incremental enhancement was either entirely new code or entirely new functionality. Draw a room, add animations, add collisions, create database queries, respond to input. New. New. New.
But lately I find that I now have kind of two tiers of code: (a) stuff I wrote way back that is foundational and important and has been tested and refined and tweaked and expanded, and (b) stuff that I am squeezing into the gaps anew. And to make it more interesting, a lot of those gaps are emerging through copying stuff I already wrote and using it in a slightly different way. This is a good thing, I think. If you build a system and it works and it is something that can be stretched a bit and nudged a bit and reused so that you have two very similar systems leveraging some of the same resources and working in pretty much the same way but resulting in slightly different outcomes, then that’s a good design practice.
An example might help here. Take my path grid code for example.
I got ambitious one weekend and diverted myself by working on something I should have left for a later phase: I built a path tracking algorithm for npcs. It’s not complex. To be fair, the whole thing could be expanded easily, but as it stands it is literally an invisible grid matrix that corresponds to each tile of a room map. The two are independent, but they are tethered together digitally in that when one moves the other moves, when one changes the other changes, that kinda thing. The grid consists of and X x Y size, and each “cell” contains a bit of data: planar coordinates that correspond to the map, a “type” and most importantly for my npcs, and “occupier” code. An NPC exists as a varible inside the grid “occupying” a cell when it is standing still, then checks a path to see if the next cell is occupied or not. If so it changes direction. If not, it occupies two cells for a moment as it moves from one to the next, then releases the one it left back to a cleared state. It sounds complex, but it took less lines of code to make it work that than to explain it here. I tested it. I pushed it. I have tweaked and solidified it. It works pretty well.
And so rather than rewrite something entirely new for how objects exist in a room—sitting on shelves or on the floor as obstacles—I just duplicated some of my npc code and now, as far as the software is concerned, objects are just a kind of npc that lives on that same invisible grid occupying a cell.
The original npc code took me over a week to write.
Building off of that code in the same amount of time I was able to add a store system, a player inventory and toolbelt, and an entire scheme of putting obstacles and objects in the room—all while I was deep in some school courses where I had rightly diverted eighty percent of my attentions. I had once figured this second part would take me a month of coding. Instead, it just sort of was an oh-copy-paste-this-code-and it mostly worked.
I like to think that was all good planning, but it was mostly just a bit of fortuitous flukey foresight.
The short version of all this is that my code is sprinting because of these lucky shortcuts but now running into the bottleneck of my ability to art fast enough.
I guess I need to spend more time drawing and less time writing long winded posts about it, huh?
In building this game world as it is, filled with floors and walls and shelves and light swtiches and everything else, I knew I was eventually going to run headlong into what I perceived as my biggest challenge: the NPC.
What is an NPC? For all you non-gaming folks out there, the term NPC stands for Non Player Character, or anything in your game world that is for all intents and purposes “alive” and mobile. Mostly though, the term NPC refers to the people, animals and (in some games but so far not mine) monsters or enemies.
The thing is, it is all fine and simple to build a wall or a shelf, but it’s a whole other undertaking to build in code something that has behaviours—behaviours like walking around the room and interacting with objects and having conversations with the player, et cetera, et cetera.
I mean, think about it this way: to move the player around the screen I have (of course) lots of hard rules built into the system about boundary collisions and input directions and all of that can be negotiated in real time by a human being playing the game with a brain inside their head poking at a keyboard.
But on the other hand, an NPC needs to be literally programmed to do things in the game. These are not magic or automatic. They are code, and carefully plotted tangles of logic loops. Like, simply to appear to move, an NPC needs to have a route to follow around the room, a kind of connect the dots map, and then of course to follow that map completely independently of whatever the player (with the aforementioned brain) is doing in the foreground and too, while everything else is going on. In every frame of game time, a hundred times per second, I need to have coded in a “what do I do now” kind of command that also tracks a “what have I already done” and a “what do I need to do next” and “where the heck am I in this multi-dimensional universe anyways” state of existence.
Sounds pretty straightforward, huh?
To be fair, it is only just mathematics around geometry and timers and coordinate planes and incremental counters, joined together in an elaborate choreography upon an invisible stage that needs to itself be tracked and moved in perfect synchronization with the player movement and the more little factors that are considered the more lifelike it all appears until the player (and sometimes event the programmer) forgets that the little pixel art moving around the screen isn’t really a person or an animal and is instead a picture being projected in perfect and elaborate lockstep to everything else already going on.
The game kinda resembles a digital layer cake of geometric planes. For our purposes in discussing the NPC challenge, there are three key layers:
the player layer on top which is little more than a picture (that never actually moves anywhere) of a little dude moving his legs or whatever,
the room plane on the bottom, which is a grid map to which every square of a matrix of about thirty by thirty is bolted an image of a single floor tiles or a single wall, maybe a single decoration or a single object, or aything else that doesn’t move, essentially a thousand times over to form a literal gridded map that comes together to make the picture of what looks like a furnished room, and
an NPC plane upon which the in-game life-forms persist through time and are continually moved from square to square like upon an invisible chess board, revealed when they are in the same room as the player or hidden when not.
When the player moves anywhere—around the geometry of a room or through a door to another room—both the room plane and the NPC plane shift around on the screen. It’s as if—to go back to the chess analogy—you were holding your player piece still in your hand just barely above the board and someone was shifting the board around under your piece. And then you held your piece in the air while they swapped everything out for a new board from another game, over and over, every time you made your move in one game, swapping to the next board, for thirty five different boards.
Convoluted, huh?
It really kinda is, and so you see the challenge I faced.
how does this all work, really tho?
Like everything, though, I worked through this incrementally.:
Can I spawn that middle layer? Yup.
Now, can I spawn an NPC sprite onto that middle layer independent of the other two layers? Ok, that works, but it doesn’t move relative to the player.
Okay, so can I make my NPC sprite seem to stand in one spot in the room? Yes. I lock the coordinate geometry of the NPC plane to the plane of the room.
Next I need to make it move around realistically relative to the room, so can I do that? Well, I add a coordinate path vector and loop through that moving the NPC around on its own plane while tracking its progress along the track.
Okay, can I do that with more than one NPC in different rooms? Sure. Add a conditional loop to spawn a second NPC linked to a different room id.
Oops, now both NPCs appear in both rooms, each following their own path, can I fix that? Of course. I trigger a check and change in visiblity when whenever the player moves rooms.
Great, but now how do I interact with my new NPCs? Um. One more system to check if the player and the NPC “collide” geometrically in game plane maths and then pass that state along to the rest of the game to await further instruction.
Yikes. It works.
The result of all this is a complex—but actually robustly elegant-ish—tool that lets me spawn as many NPCs as I may need in the game simply by adding new “data” to a file with some simple starting and trigger variables. I even tested having 250 spiders walking around one room just to check and it seemed pretty solid.
The whole process of building this game has been something like this.
Ask a question, then increment through the solution until something works, then refine until it works well. Then move onto the next question.
Some of the people reading this know me, and know me well enough to know that I have been recently pursuing some education and certification in the field of Business Analysis.
At the other end of this road for me lays a certificate that says that I can think big picture thoughts about systems and people and processes and technology and organizations and then write those down into neat and tidy documents—and then hopefully get paid for that.
*wink wink if you’re reading this.
In the meantime, I am writing an indie game in Rust and Bevy and blogging those big picture (and often small picture) thoughts about the systems and people and processes and technology and organizations involved in turning thousands of lines of cryptic computer instruction into a toy in the form of a virtual science fictional supermarket.
We’ve all got our quirks, huh?
The overlap between my two efforts is probably not coincidental.
I have been doing all sorts of real work over the last couple decades that, while not strictly capital-BA Business Analysis, has been in the realm of doing the things that business analysts do to accomplish the things that business analysts accomplish with the goal of creating projects, supporting volunteer gigs, or (as it turns out out) scoping out my own learning and side projects.
As I sat in the most recent of my courses with a room full of people talking about business analysis-kinda things, my mind started drifting back to the effort I had made leading into and throughout this very Pleck’s Mart game project.
I mean, just for starts, I’ve been running it like a project. I have a capital-P project set up in GitHub, for example, with actual Milestones and Issues and Timelines and a Board on which to view it all. (But then, that’s all more of the project management stuff and you clicked over here for the business analysis stuff.)
Thus, this all leads to the question: how did I get from dabbling in some code in my basement on a chilly December morning to sitting in Starbucks legitimately considering a plan that brings me up to and beyond releasing a game on Steam in the next year.
Business analysis, as it turns out and broadly speaking of course is a lot about understanding a problem in the current state and doing a lot of work to make a plan to bring you to a future state.
My current state (back in December):
I suddenly had some spare time on my hands.
I had been working on some scattered ideas for a game on paper for a while, but had no vision for how to turn that idea into real pixels on a screen.
I didn’t know any game-coding-type computer languages or libraries well enough to try this big idea, did I?
In the broad sense of things, me as a creatively-inclined guy had the problem of having a big idea with few details or sufficient skills to achieve the fruition of said idea, but adequate time to address some of those deficiencies if I was focused and directed at the right things.
My future state was simpler, if challenging to achieve: having learned a computer language to a level of proficiency to design, build and support an indie game, I will have a game available to download from the internet for the public to enjoy.
So. What next?
Here there are a lot of things that a Business Analyst might do to assess those challenges. When one is working with multiple people or an organization this involves meetings and documents and surveys and digging into org charts to understand where the right people are to get the information squeezed into something resembling a plan. For just little ole me, tho? This started out as basically some reflective writing and starting to plot things out.
Maybe a BA would dig into a SWOT analysis or do some functional decomposition on the current state to try and understand how things work. For me, I sat in Starbucks and legitimately wrote about this. Reflective writing. Introspection. Personal brainstorming. Whatever you want to call it. You can probably read some of the early stuff that I posted in the archives of my blog. A lot of it was at a high level working to understand what tools I had in my belt (my strengths) or the things I still needed to figure out (my weaknesses) while putting it into the context of some of the resources and time I’d recently stumbled into (my opportunities) and the contrarian facts of tackling a dauntingly huge project on my own for which I had no real prior experience (my threats.)
Maybe, a BA might plod into the territory of looking for gaps. In my own context, I have skills in multi-modal art and a bit of experience coding. I also have two hundred thousands words of contextual lore that I’ve written over the last year and that I can definitely use to support the world building I had imagined accompanied my future state game. On the other hand, games need, for example, music and I’m no composer (gap) and games require extensive testing on multiple platforms and I have just one aging desktop computer that has never even heard of 4K resolution (another gap.)
So, at my Starbucks table with a GitHub project open and my writing tools at the ready, I did some informal requirements gathering with myself.
I needed a proof of concept. Could I code anything at all, let alone a relatively complex game? I’ve been scripting web code, but those legit-coding courses I took in University were a little dusty in my brain.
I needed a small budget. I was likely going to need to pay for a few things along the way, from collaborators to technology to even (way down the road) a listing fee for hosting the game in a storefront.
I needed a marketing plan. Indie games win or lose in the real world on word of mouth. Building something in isolation and posting just hoping for people to play it is pretty much a recipe for failure. (Ahem, follow me on Substack or Bluesky!)
I needed a schedule. I’m in the awesome position at the moment to treat this like a job. (I mean, if someone wants to chaaaaaange that, I’m cool with a conversation about it but…) I can’t just poke at this thing part time and expect to have a product inside of even a decade, let alone a year.
Simple enough, right?
All of this penultimately led to lots of words and a few contemplative walks in the woods and at the end of the day I was staring at that capital-P Project in GitHub that I mentioned earlier. I mean, I could have written all this up and formalized it, you know, put together a lovely slide deck to try and convince the guy at the top but by then I was already on board and was too busy sitting in my pajamas at the keyboard trying to animate some sprites or something to need another meeting about this.
Does this mean the Business Analyst hat has come off?
Of course not. I mean, it is a bit of conceptualized silly fun to think about it all this way (particularly in the context of my educational and certification pursuits running parallel to all this) but there is a lesson buried inside, too. Just over one month into this effort I may still be a long way away from a finished project, but simultaneously I have a plan. I did the work. I put the pre-work into this thing of sitting down and plotting out not just what I was trying to accomplish, but how I would get there, what might get in my way, and some ideas to overcome the obstacles along the way.
I have a bright orange textbook sitting on my desk right now that outlines a vast collection itemizing and explaining all the tools and techniques that a business analyst needs to pry open something bigger and more complex (and more expensive) than a simple indie game project by some guy in his basement, and I could probably open that book to any random page and find something useful to enhance my efforts—and maybe I will. But my point, and the lesson here, is that as much as the code is important and interesting and a big part of what I’m doing, there is more going on than a man in his basement dabbling in being a keyboard cowboy.
And in as much, I think that has brought me as far as I have come thus far, and hopefully keeps me going forward.
Analysis and planning for the win. Achievement Unlocked!
The pursuit of phase Paranormal Pickle continues as I round off another development milestone this evening and creep closer to something that is actually, really, starting to look like a game.
I will preface all of this with a bit of an anecdote on digital frugality.
In this era of the robust availability of processing capacity it is easy to find people discussing frame rates and generous graphical outputs derived from access to huge quantities of processing power. The advantage to using a game engine is that I can work under the assumption that the people who built both Rust and Bevy have considered things like memory management and processing pipelines so that I don’t need to think too much about either.
I mean, a little bit. I need to think about it some.
But I was overthinking it and as I develop this game which has a very retro architecture and two-dimensional 8-bit vibe, I may have been leaning into those thoughts a little too agressively.
I found myself doing some back-of-a-napkin calculations about what a very conservative number of simultaneous processes and active game systems might be. Then I searched for something similar, looking for confirmation of my math maybe. And then I outright asked an AI bot what a modest number of live processes and spawned objects and active systems might be for a game written in Bevy and Rust.
See, I had opened up my inspector tool and having spawned these generous tile-based rooms and layered those rooms with decorative objects and then animated those objects and then added collision to a bunch of those objects and then added a bunch more UI objects on top of that and all that was just to show the world and not actually calculate the game mechanics itself, I had come up with a number that to me looked daunting. At any given time, it turns out, I had somewhere between 1500 and 2000 spawned objects and systems.
To be clear each of those systems might be very, very small. Displaying a 64×64 pixel sprite at position X,Y on the screen. Doing a simple geometric calculation. Incrementing a number in a counter. Saving something to the database. All small, but add them all up and you have (a) a game and (b) a lot of systems that run in a continual loop about a couple hundred times per second each.
So how many are too many? I mean, I keep adding stuff and hoping that the game doesn’t suddenly drop to three frames per second because I’ve hit some limit.
Well, the answer I got back from my back-of the napkin calculations suggested that I could probably run the game at 120 fps if I kept that spawned number under 25,000.
If I got up to 100,000 I was going to start noticing it eating up the processor, and if I happened to hit a million I may want to consider doing some optimization.
The internet, AI, and everything else vaguely confirmed this.
So, to be clear, even at my biggest, sprite-filled, action-packed room state, I was running at about 8% of my most conservative everything-is-humming-along estimate. I mean, the proof is in the pudding, but the moral of this story is that I can probably stop being so digitally frugal and add a bit more life to the game.
Which is exactly what I’ve been doing.
I wrote a whole post on building my menu system (which to run compared to the game-proper processing power requirements is like comparing a pedal bike to a Harley motorcycle) so I won’t go into detail on that here.
But I have also been doing a lot of design work. This phase was about furnishing and decorating and I’ve added a whole couple of categories for Things That Appear on the Screen (TM) like simple A/B state decorative objects and this thing I’ve called lively decorations which are actively animated as part of the universe (slurping up some of that spare processing power, of course.)
In the background and to facilitate all these things I’ve had to implement and polish up a bunch of actual game systems, too. I mean, I wrote already about the game state stuff which facilitates the switching around between menus and the game, but I also added a clock to the game. The clock, of course, has a game built in, but it doesn’t specifically track anything besides a kind of this-app-has-been-running-for-this-long seconds counter. I added a clock in the sense that the game now tracks a 24-hour game cycle of days, hours and minutes. And not only does that time clock save routinely as part of the game state database save file, but it now makes the game feel like time is actually passing. You can open the menu and it now says something like “it’s 8:43 on day 2” of the game—which having a time clock might be important to things like having a store with open hours. My kid asked me if I was going to make it so you need to sleep (a’la Stardew Valley, which I admit is a bit of a back-of-mind influence on a few of my design choices) and this is starting to make more and more sense, particularly if I will need to have a bunch of “nightly” calculations happen to my grocery inventory.
So as you can see, things are taking some real shape here and chugging along a game is almost, kinda, sorta appearing. That feels real nice.
I’ve veered lightly away from building my virtual grocery store this week in favour of an equally important aspect of this game project: the menu system.
Yikes! Yeah, I know, me too. I’d rather be painting sprites and building an interesting world, but oh that user interface is going to be important.
As with almost everything I’ve approached this particular problem—that is, how to build a menu over top of a game world—incrementally. And as I’ve been lightly glazing over the coding progress in most posts on this blog, I wanted to do something a little different and deep dive into how I approached this particular problem, if only because it took me two solid days to work through and get it functioning in the barest-of-bare minimums (that is, as of another three hour coding session this morning.)
So, here goes.
You may have picked up on the vibe that story is very important to what I’m building here. I am a novelist in my other crazy project life, so having a coherent story with lore is key to this whole deal. To that effect one of the earlier things that I built (a week or so back in phase 0.2.3) was a kind of simple story engine that runs through the whole game.
Stories in Pleck’s Mart are comprised of a few simple database tables: One keeps track of all the words, and one keeps track of all the statuses. Just to complicate things, a story can be comprised of multiple “beats” or pages. This is for both flow and because my font choice at the moment really only allows for about 250 characters on the screen at any given time, so that’s like 20 words. Any substantial story needs to graced with a bit more expositional text than a tweet, you know? In other words, pagination.
(There was a deliberate choice not to use bools for some of these status flags as I’ve got some ideas about non-binary status states and using the system for books, notes, etc, but more on that in a future post.)
The story engine works pretty well, if I’m being honest. I’m happy with it so far and I haven’t run into any big flaws short of it could use a nicer UI design.
All the chapters indexes are loaded into the status database on a new game initiation, and if a story has an unread status then a collision trigger coded into the game map can fling it’s unique code into the story queue which is constantly checking for active stories in the queue and bobs-yer-uncle it reads it all (text from the data file) into the database, spawns a story UI up on the screen and you can either NEXT your way through each beat or EXIT out and move along to just play the game. Meanwhile things churn in the background to change the status to read so that particular part of story never spawns again—
—which leads to a little sad face from Brad as I’m building this game.
See, unless you play the game over you can’t (couldn’t) go back and read the story chapters that you already triggered. They were complete=1 and would never spawn again on any given save file. Thus, one of my first “this needs to be in the menu” features was the addition of a story history so a player could revisit and review and reread—and thinking about how to accomplish this was where I was sitting two-plus days ago, staring blankly into a computer screen full of five thousand lines of game code that barely even had a menu system, let alone something useful for a story history navigator.
I started to address this problem by tucking in and refactoring the whole menu scheme that I’d started to build last phase. (It was okay, but it had some limitations.)
First, I divided the in-game menu into three distinct, heirarchecal panels: there is now a TOP menu which is a kind of icon-based ribbon of menu categories. Next there is the LEFT menu which is a scrollable list of sub-categories. And finally there is the RIGHT menu which is for now a kind of panel that displays the results of whatever you selected in the left menu.
To break that down with an example, when the STORY icon is selected in the TOP menu, then a scrollable list of STORY CHAPTERS appears in the LEFT menu which subsequently results in the selected story chapter’s TEXT BODY to display in the RIGHT panel.
Like so:
If all this sounds fairly straightforward, well, it is—but it took me a couple days of debugging and coding effort to not only get to that architecture straight in my head and in place, but also to make it actually work.
how does it work?
For starters it’s all based on a collection of menu state components that are tracked and manipulated by player input. This is the root and core of how this all functions.
That is to say, when a player moves into the GAME MENU App() state by pressing the M key while in-game, the App() moves out of the GAME state and into the overall GAME MENU state. (And vice versa on closing.)
This action spawns all three menu panels:
TOP menu has a GameMenuState of 0;
LEFT menu has a ScrollMenuState of 0 with a bundled Length value;
RIGHT menu is a blank canvas;
A player now looking at the menu on the screen can either move Left or Right which cycles the GameMenuState from 0 to 1 to 2 to 3 and back to 0.
Or, a player can move up and down which cycles the left menus’ ScrollMenuState from 0 to 1 all the way up to a variable length value stored in that state. (Because of the variable length this also does some fancy math in there to adjust the scroll_y value so that the active item is within the view area of the left menu’s draw area. Math, math, always lots of math. And my daughter writing her Math final in her last year of high school in just two days from me penning these words wonders when she’ll ever need math again! Bah!
If all this seems pretty basic, it is. The tricks all come when we need to the GAME MENU systems in the App() to react to all these variables.
For starters the contents of the LeftMenu are uniform in design but simultaneously conditional on the GameMenuState. That is to say, it’s always a scrolling list with an icon and a piece of text, but what icons and what text depends on the number in that GameMenuState.
For example, right now my STORY menu is the fourth icon on the top menu ribbon. This means that the App() listens for a GameMenuState of 3. If that happens to become true a lot of things then are conditionally allowed to happen:
the fourth icon sprite in the TOP menu “remaps” to the “highlighted” version of itself on a texture map so that it appears in colour instead of in greyscale. In other words, it highlights itself and de-highlights all the others.
a query extracts all the “complete” story codes (things the player has seen) from the database as a vector of data and iterates through them to build out an n=rows number of icon and story title pairs inside the LEFT menu canvas. In the case of a player who has just started the game and played into the first room, this means the function will spawn two item pairs in the list: (1) an icon an a piece of text with the title of chapter 1 (the introductory story text) and (2) an icon an a title of chapter 2 (the story that activates when the player first enters the store). Later, as more story beats are unlocked this list will grow longer.
the LeftMenuStatus resets to 0. (Top item in the scrollable list.)
the first item in the list of things in the left menu goes into it’s highlighted state in the same fashion as the top menu does when it is highlighted (ie. the sprite shifts its texture map and de-highlights everything else)
the right panel function checks for valid content based on a hierarchical check though GameMenuStatus of 3 and a LeftMenuStatus of 0, which in this case populates the canvas with the first story block’s text.
the right panel (still checking through this conditional mode) waits for a keypress and if the player clicks the NEXT key it does some more mathy-texty-database stuff to pull the next beat from the story chapter and then replaces the content of the right panel if that all happens.
Of course, there are some extra conditionals and “something happened” checks tucked in there somewhere to balance things out and prevent these conditionals just going into processor eating loops of infinity, but those are details that don’t materially impact the overall deal here.
The net result of all this is that if, while playing the game, the player presses the M key a menu appears.
If the player then Arrow Key Left/Right’s over to the story menu, a list of her story history items will appear in the left panel.
And as they player Arrow Key Up/Down’s through that list of story history, the first beat of each story will appear in the right panel.
And if more than one beat exists for a story, the player can press the N key to cycle endlessly through the various beats that exist in that chapter:
let new_text: &str = this_story_text.as_str();
for mut this_text in rightcontentpanel.iter_mut() {
this_text.0.clear();
this_text.0.push_str(&new_text.clone()); }
Voila. A menu with story history.
Check.
side note: If enough people are interested in such a thing, I could pull this menu code out of my main project, clean it up for general use, and release it as a Git repository.
Comment if that’s of interest.
looking back
My biggest hangups after all this got working as I expected were making sure that the canvas contents were responsive to the conditional changes: mutable text fields, scrollable nodes, etc, etc — which you would think in retrospect should be pretty obvious but designing this all in raw code with overlapping coordinate systems across three spawned objects just seemed to be keeping track of things and naming stuff in meaningful ways.
And having built it this way, I think—right now, I think—all this work lays the foundations for most every other menu in the game:
The items in any the left menu can be dynamically defined by the contents of a database or hand coded to be very specific items.
The contents of the right panel can be adapted to display just about anything, text, images, or inputs.
And, not that I have much to fill them at the moment but I left room for up to eight menu categories, which is very probably overkill.
Now, back to building that virtual grocery store, huh?
