As indie games go, Tomb of Tyrants adheres very strictly to the grid; a lot of games will mix and match pixelated images of different resolutions or freely move and rotate sprites to achieve desired effects, but I decided on the challenge of the straight and narrow. Sometimes, most notably with the game's UI, that choice has lead to some mixed results.
Easily one of the most maligned aspects of the game has been the low resolution fonts. While they fit within the parameters I chose for the game, and I won't be changing them beyond the occasional tweak, I have finally created an optional, double-resolution font for those who desire additional clarity.
This was made possible by a lot of underlying changes to rendering and menus. These sort of changes have the potential to be volatile on different hardware setups--if you experience any problems running the game, please contact me (discussion boards, comments, or even just friend me), and I will try to get any issues sorted out as quickly as possible. However, with these changes, I've added a few just-for-fun filtering options.
While Tomb of Tyrants falls on the strict end of the grid spectrum, it also rests on the liberal end of the palette spectrum; due to features like lighting, palette-swapping, and color-blindness support, the game does not stick to an old-school palette. But now, if you feel that the game isn't retro enough, you can enable 256-color modes and dithering options!
There's also a weird "artsy" filter, for people who don't like pixels so much. If you use this with the default font, it is actually much more legible than seen here--the double resolution font does not play super well with the filters, due to having double the sample resolution:
I might add another style or two from time to time, but this feature was just a free-time experiment that I thought would be fun for others to play with =). The default rendering remains untouched.
Other new features: tile drop indicators while making moves, move canceling (right-click while dragging a move), and the ability to queue floors so they will build as soon as room and resources allow.
There are also some bug fixes and other minor things as well (like proper accommodation for Windows DPI scaling). I expect I'll have an opt-in beta update for controller support sometime in the next few days. Thank you for all of the great suggestions and reports this week--most of this list is your doing ːtotfedoraː!
Changelog
Additions:
- Double-resolution font option (replaces the game's three small fonts)
- "Ghost" tile drop indicators; when a move will result in falling tiles, the resting places will be displayed
- Moves can be canceled by right-clicking
- A floor will be queued for construction if you click it while it is unavailable; it will then be automatically built the moment it becomes available
- Support for Windows DPI scaling (commonly used on displays with very high DPI, like tablets or 4k monitors)
- Added a tooltip to the top edge of codex, noting that the codex can be dragged and repositioned
- Option to disable "ghost" floor buttons, if they feel overwhelming
- Pixel style options--"Soft" (default), "Hard" (scales more harshly than "Soft," but better for dithering), and "Artsy" (lots of blending for similar colors)
- Dithering options--"None" (default), "Low-Res" (very noticeable dither at game's target resolution), "High-Res" (subtle dithering at native window resolution)
- Color options--"Full" (default), "256-Warm" (typical 8-bit palette spread; 3-bit red, 3-bit green, and 2-bit blue channels), "256-Cool" (better matches the game's actual color scheme; 2-bit red, 3-bit green, 3-bit blue channels)
- A couple of new tutorial entries to cover new features
Changes:
- Revisions and updates to some help topics and tutorial entries
- Can click and drag meters in the menus (volume, color, margins, etc.)
- Shady Shop now reduces only equipment cooldowns (this puts it on par with the Alchemist, and another floor will take up relics in the future)
- Floor names are now drawn over default floor frames (but still under highlights)
- Altered a few UI colors slightly to improve color contrast on plots and some codex entries
- Character lighting is determined automatically now, rather than manually configured--it should be more consistent than before
- Rewrote a lot of underlying menu code (to prep support for keyboard and controller navigation)
- Rewrote a lot of rendering code (to allow for advanced effects and increased resolution on specific elements)
Fixes:
- Multiplier was erroneously being moved to the DHV when making matches in the actual Hoard
- Lighting glitch on surface
- Inventory item destruction did not update floor purchase buttons (noticeable with Rabid Rabbithole and Glorious Grenade)
- Corrected some wrong colors and parts on a couple of characters
- "Buy floor [x]" plot was no longer appearing
- It was possible to load a legacy resource with less than the minimum starting amount