I wanted a nice simple menu system for pico-8 so I decided to recreate an old UI I made ages ago in Flash (my game Red Rogue uses it).
The Cardinal Menu only uses arrow keys to navigate. The menu is made of branches. Each item in a branch points to either a string (providing a description panel), a function in your code, a new branch, or nothing (disabled).
The purpose of this system is to make it as fast as possible to build a menu and add options.
In the demo you can see what each option does and there's a demonstration of an inventory system.
The menu system alone is 712 tokens.
This is about as basic I could make it without adding too much noise to the code, but I welcome suggestions for improvements and optimisations.
A quick update...
Let's say you're in a shop and you have 5 gold. A sword is 5 gold and an axe is 10 gold. You want the menu to say the axe option is disabled. So now you can define a menu item that checks if it's disabled - you just point it at a function that gives an answer.
I also added a selection animation for input feedback and trimmed down my math. The menu alone is now 800 tokens but at least it's a round number and easy to build a crafting system with.
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