Radial Menu for Fishing Planet

[mitderplatte]

Hey guys,

ever since I started playing the game, I was always thinking that there should be an easier way of changing your lures and hooks while at the lake.

As of now, you can of course use the L1 and R1 buttons to switch between your rods and lures / bait. But it's somehow limiting.

Because when you use a spinning rod, and have e.g. a crankbait equipped, you can only switch your cranks / spinners / etc. If you'd want to equip a jighead + worm, you'd have to go back to the menu, select your rod, go down to jigheads, select your jig, and then select your worm. That's maybe a dozen buttons you have to press. (Assuming you're playing with a controller, and not mouse + keyboard)

If you go back into the game, you can then change from a worm to a nymph easiliy. But you can't change the hook size of the jighead. Or quickly switch back to a spinner. Furthermore, once you reach level 40, you're mostly carrying somewhere around 40-100 different lures. It's quite time-consuming to scroll through all the lures - especially in competitions / tournaments.

Same goes for the hook sizes if you're bobber fishing, as well as the feeders, weights, and chums.

Of course you can always go back into the menu, but I think it'd be awesome if we could get an efficient and intuitive way of doing that in the in-game-screen. Especially when using a controller.

Coming from games like Red Dead Redemption, Rust, etc., I always liked the radial menus as a concept - especially for consoles. I think this would work great for fishing planet. Especially with the rod-pods as a new feature - and the problems with double-button configurations.

As a first idea, holding L1 could bring up your rod pod slots, and make it easy to put down, pick up, or switch rods on your rod pod, using the left or right stick. One could even incorporate some kind of indicator for when there's action on that rod (like a blinking light). Makes it easier to figure out which one you want to pick up. Or an indicator if your bait was eaten / lost on that rod. As of now, it only shows "(2) bait eaten / lost" in the top of the screen. But as we're not using a keyboard with shortcuts 1-7 for our rods, you don't necessarily know which one is number 2.

Holding R1 could bring up the menu for the rod you're holding, and group your available baits into "Bass Jigs / Spinners, Jigheads, etc.". Once you select a category, you jump into the next level, and get a list of all available baits in that category.

If done right, this would greatly improve the handling and UX. Making use of the analog sticks to navigate through the radial menu also solves the problem of the d-pad buttons having a double-configuration with rod pod slots and brake / reel speed settings.

One would have to figure out how exactly to group everything, and what buttons to use. But I wanted to share the idea as an inspiration.

I have included some screenshots and a video from other games / radial menu concepts, and threw together a small demonstration. But I think you get the idea Let me know what you think, or if this has maybe already crossed your mind.