Developer Diary: The Item Wheel

Hello everyone and welcome to our Item Wheel developer diary!

We’re joined by Ami Tsurugi, UI Designer, and Magnus Eckers, UI Developer. Today, we’ll talk about the new Item Wheel feature launching for free with our upcoming reserve, Revontuli Coast.

This feature’s been highly requested for some time, so we hope this blog post provides interesting insights!

Why an Item Wheel?

There are currently a couple of different ways to switch items in theHunter: Call of the Wild. Each method has its downsides.

Selecting items with the D-pad or the mouse middle button is time-consuming, for example. You have to scroll through each item one by one to find the one you want.

You can use hotkeys with a keyboard and mouse, but you still have to remember which items are assigned to which keys.

Another major issue is there’s currently no way to quickly swap ammo.

We were aware of a lot of feedback from the community on these issues. With all this in mind, we set out to solve them by introducing a new radial menu.

Button Mapping and Functionality

The most basic functionality of the Item Wheel is of course to switch items.

Open the wheel by pressing and holding the mouse middle button/D-pad up button, and you’ll see the radial menu with assigned items.

Move the mouse/tilt the right stick to highlight an item you wish to select. Release the key to close the wheel and select the highlighted item. Most of the keys can also be remapped in the settings menu.

If you own a hunting dog, you may be familiar with the dog command wheel – another radial menu.

While we kept the feel of the command wheel, we’ve made changes to its controls to enable faster item selection.

Rather than hovering over the slot containing the item you wish to select, you highlight slots with the direction of your mouse movements.

The currently highlighted item is selected when you close the wheel.

Showcasing the new item wheel UI views in the in-game inventory.

You can assign equipment to the slots in the inventory as usual. There’s now a wheel view added to the inventory screen, and you can switch between the two depending on your needs.

Switching Ammo and Sights

In the Item Wheel, you can also switch ammo and sights by pressing Q/LB for ammo, and E/RB for sights while highlighting a weapon.

You can also use the stats panel on the right side of the wheel to quickly find suitable ammo for the animal you’re hunting.

Now, if you suddenly encounter a Class 9 animal when ammo for a Class 1 is attached to your weapon, you can just hit the key and quickly swap to the right ammo!

That’s all for today’s diary. We look forward to seeing you all try out this new feature and we hope you like it.

Please stay tuned as we continue to work on more quality of life improvements. If you’d like to give us feedback or suggestions, reach out to us via theHunter: Call of the Wild feedback channel on the official Discord server!