I stepped away from the quests today to put together a rudimentary character menu. So far it's nothing special, just a bunch of labels. I'm sure the layout is all wrong and looks right. But it's a start. Another small step today. I started by just adding a couple of labels for each skill and stat. Then I put together a quick script to reference those labels.

There's no functionality yet to actually load, show, or hide this UI element. Going to have to break into the UI manager again to deal with that. Actually, it's possible that functionality already exists. Yeah, it seems to exist, but I'm not sure if it's not working or if I did something wrong with my scene. After a little testing, I found my scene wasn't great, but with a few changes everything started showing up! 

And, as it turns out, the functionality to show and hide the character menu does exist and works! I just manually changed the game state to the right thing and my new scene shows up with no problem! Change back to the old state and it disappears like it should! I think that's enough for today, but it's a great start! 

My next steps are going to be adding a simple function that reacts when the screen is shown. That function will force an update of all the labels it needs to so it can display accurate player-related data. Then I just need to add a button (and a shortcut key) to show/hide the menu. I actually want to add another on-screen control to bring up the pause menu. Maybe I'll get them both done at the same time.

And the best part about today is I didn't rely on Gemini at all. I told it what I did, just to keep it informed. But it didn't help at all with the work I did today, I did it all myself!