Hi, I am wondering how people actually make their "help page"

For example, if you have tons of information that you want to convey to the player , do you create an entire sprite to draw it onto the screen or do you position them using the individual sprites that you already created for your game ? If you use individual sprites, is there any "design pattern" that can do it in an elegant way or does the code look extremely hackish because of all the constant values for the position of all the individual sprites.

Not sure if you guys get what I mean. =/

I personally choose individual sprites because that is easier to modify than to change the entire image. I am very curious how everyone else does it.

I once did the entire sprite way for my LudumDare but I didn't really like it.

I am also curious how the industry actually does this.

It depends if I am making a game that supports multiple languages or not. If only 1 language is supported then I'll create an entire sprite for each help element and be done with with. If I support more than one language then I break out the text and make it dynamic and all other things are just one static image.

Generally speaking professional UI systems don't really have position values coded out in the source code it is data for the system to act upon. This can be XML, a full scene graph or even a 3ds max or maya scene that gets loaded up.

In addition to these UI scene data as what NightCreature83 said. The nodes representing a UI element may have other attributes associated to it. Like position locking and position ratios relative to the screen. This can be useful especially if your game runs on different screen sizes as they can just automatically adjust based on these attributes than having an absolute position values.

In addition to these UI scene data as what NightCreature83 said. The nodes representing a UI element may have other attributes associated to it. Like position locking and position ratios relative to the screen. This can be useful especially if your game runs on different screen sizes as they can just automatically adjust based on these attributes than having an absolute position values.

You are better off fixing that with anchors than relative positions as only the anchors ever need to know how big the screen size is.

i forgot the word anchor so i used the word position locking instead but thanks for bringing that correct word up.