Hey everyone!
This month I stepped way from development a bit, but for good reason. I got married!! The second half of the month saw me getting back into the swing of things and I've made significant progress on one of the most requested features: reducing the amount of inputs required to take your turn!
Here is a video demonstrating the old vs new flows:
Changelog
- Completely redesigned action bar UI, as well as battle info into more of a final state.
- Your unit is now auto-selected for you. I noticed while watching some streamers play through it that it wasn't immediately obvious to new players who was acting. By auto-selecting them for you, as well as showing the portrait in the action bar, I hope to avoid that confusion. This also takes away 1 unneeded click.
- Your attack is now auto-selected if you have an enemy in range to attack.
- You no longer choose a weapon, instead you default to the one you have equipped. If you want to change it, you can click on the weapon in the action bar, or hit "TAB" to equip the next weapon (key mappings coming soon TM). Almost everyone who played remarked on the confusion of using the bandage and having to click to select the weapon.
- Choosing abilities will be done similarly to equipping weapons, with E and Q taking you to the next ability. If an ability requires a certain weapon, that weapon will be auto-equipped, so the player doesn't need to take any unnecessary inputs.
- New font throughout the game. May try it in the dialogue as well.
- Some code refactoring to increase maintainability, and prepare for adding more complex abilities.
As you can see, I'm trying to make it as smooth and intuitive as possible to take an action. This UI is what the player will be interacting with the most, so I need to make sure it feels good to use. At this point I'm redoing quite a few UIs to their more "final" state now that I have more player feedback to go off of. Thank you all who played and left feedback, it has truly truly been invaluable to me.
Future
- Blinking health bars to show amount of damage done.
- Blinking tiles to show affected units. ex: When using taunt, you'll no longer select one unit, but rather every tile in range will be blinking.
- Tile highlights to show movement.
- Title menu UI update. Make it more clear that you're saving the game + update the UI to a more final state.
- More writing and character designs (always). Prologue is getting completely re-written.
That's all for this month! Thank you all who are following and leaving encouraging words, it makes working on the game so gratifying seeing feedback come in, even if it's just to say you've enjoyed the game.
Best,
Eldin T.