Hey everyone, Stephen here with a progress update!
We are working hard on a new patch for you, including the new pickerpal, updated movement code for the mini deer, a new factory design, and a new mini deer captured building (amongst other smaller fixes). But I'm not here to talk about that,
I wanted to share some of our future plans for the game.
We are going to be porting to Xbox for 1.0! As it's our first time going to console, there are a lot of unknowns, so we've decided to start early.
This means for the foreseeable future, we'll be splitting our attention between content updates and xbox support. Our first major task is to add controller support.
Let's talk about Controller Support
Controller support isn't particularly sexy, it's a ton of work, and it's thankless work. But it has led us to something very sexy, and very fun to talk about. We're undergoing a HUGE update of the UI. We always knew that controller support was needed, but we're finally in a place to finalize the UI to support both controller and keyboard/mouse.
We are still at the "design" phase (i.e not implemented in game), but I wanted to share the direction that we're taking the UI!
Buckle up, we're about to deep dive into UI
1. Item Finder
I'm starting with the Item Finder because it's the one I'm most excited about. Not only did we clean up the recipe selection (menu on the left), but I gave the Item Finder a visual pass.
By adding a bigger base, there's more space to convey some much needed information (like the cardinal directions of north + south). We also can display important landmarks so players have some idea as to where to go.
As this is purely concept art, we'll see how much of this makes it into the game, but I'm confident this is a step in the right direction!
2. Factory
We had an issue with getting very confused players in the late game when opening Electronics Factories, Smelters, Factories, Planters and Crafting menus. Why?
Every menu looked EXACTLY THE SAME!!!
How did we fix this? We put the item you're using at the forefront of the menu.
We needed to do a better job of establishing context in these menus.
But Stephen, they JUST clicked open a factory, how could a player possibly be confused about what menu they're in?
Keep in mind that when you're building an epic factory, your brain might be thinking about a million things all at once. It's our job as designers to reduce the brain load so you can focus on kicking butt and building dope stuff. Hopefully this helps.
3. Crafting Menu
This one makes me the most nervous, as it's the most behind-the-scenes work.
They look pretty similar, but some fundamental changes to the navigation to support controller are bubbling underneath.
You'll also notice that we've added a menu at the top. The crafting menu is going to be converted into a "tab-menu". You'll be able to cycle through different menus (not sure what they are yet), but this puts more emphasize on "tab" being your go-to menu.
I've also tried to consolidate where the eye has to look to access all of the important information.
For example
I also experimented with task bar
I was hesitant to share this, as so much of this will depend on how it feels. If it feels bad to use, this design with be scrapped.... so please take this with a grain of salt. The 8 slots instead of 5 has been a highly requested feature. I take pride in including community feedback, so hopefully you guys love this change!
4. Research Menu
This was a doozy. I don't know why, but my goodness was it hard to get right. The Research menu has gone through more iterations than I care to admit (maybe 8 full iterations... sheeesh).
I attempted to simplify the background and do a better job of indicating the status of each research item.
We also moved from a horizontal to a vertical design. This lets us support more classes of research items (rather than a super long singular path of research). The single path of research was kind of boring, and didn't give players the ability to choose what they wanted to focus on for research.
We're also experimenting with an idea of RP (Research Points). This is so WIP that I don't think its worth me going into detail until we confirm it meshes well in the game. What we do know is that you generate RP with Research Boosters, and RP lets you research items. More to come about research in the future.
Planter
Finally, we've added the planter. Getting fertilizer has turned out to be a massive pain in the butt, so we decided to make the fertilizer optional (I believe this was either Siede or MonkeyMan's idea in the discord. Good job team!).
We're thinking that if you add fertilizer, it either grows faster, OR it yields more plants. Again, since it's all concept art, we'll have to test it in game to see if it makes sense.
Some Crazy Ideas
Ok listen, I'm really trusting you guys when I show you these. These are so conceptual, and so untested, that we may not do any of these.
Can we all agree that if none of these see the light of day, I don't get roasted online? Ok great. :)
I wanted to shed some light on the process in which we brainstorm ideas. So with that in mind, here are some crazy ideas
A minimap? It seems like a pretty useful feature to have in an automation/exploration game. But just from drawing this out, it does seem like a lot of work. I liked the idea of having a legend, and showing off your current task so when you're examining your epic factory from the sky, you are always away of what you're meant to be doing.
Some Datalogs??
I also thought that having discoverable datalogs in the world would help enrich the story! My biggest concern is the translation costs to translate a bajillion datalogs into 7 other languages is preeeeetty pricey. And to be honest, we haven't sold enough copies of Atrio to justify translating all of it.
But it would be awesome to add more flavor to the world with some side stories.... so hopefully we sell enough to afford translation services!
And that's it!
I hope you enjoyed our little deep dive into the UI. Hopefully most of my proposed features eventually make it into the game, but if nothing else, we're a lot closer to a final UI than we were before.
My next post will hopefully be me announcing a new content update, so stay tuned!!!
Stephen + The Isto Inc. Team