Hey there!
As of until now, I was really displeased with the UI in Gamblers Table. Depending on what language you selected it could happen that text was not properly aligned, overflowed or was down-right impossible to read. Speaking of "impossible to read" - on small devices it was just that - impossible to read. Sadly, the engine I am working with has no native functionality to easily scale text at runtime across all UI components. But I was determined to make it happen nonetheless.
So lets dive right in.
Accessibility
Keeping up the momentum from last update I've now worked on more accessibility features.
Text Scaling
As I said in the beginning, reading the text on the steam deck, mobile or literally any screen that is not "Ultra-Wide-Super-Duper-Mega-Big-Screen"-size was kind of hard. The game now starts with bigger text to begin with and you also have an option to increase it. (or decrease it, if you liked the previous size more)
Button Size
Most the buttons in the game have now increased in size by approx. 150%. It was just honestly really hard to click them on smaller devices.
Better Tabs
So if you watch the GIF above in "Text Scaling" you can see that the tabs in both the option menu and the shop jump into the next line. This was previously not the case. Instead the buttons would just disappear into the void and you had to click an extremely itsy bitsy small ">"-icon to navigate them.
This was not an issue for western languages, but especially for languages with a lot of characters that easily surpassed the width of the sidebar itself. This is now fixed.
Better Explanations
We received feedback that its not super clear what Sacrificing even does - and some skills could do with better explanations.
Sacrifing no longer requires you to hold the sacrifice button. Instead, a popup opens explaing what exactly is going to happen. Admittedly this does not look super fancy and requires more polish, but that is something for upcoming updates. Having UI elements that require you to hold them can be an issue for people with motor impairments, muscle weakness, tremors, joint pain, or certain neurological conditions that make sustained pressure hard.
It wasn't quite clear what "Sticky" really does and it sounded stronger than it actually was. It now better reflects it actual functionality, as it only triggers on-click and not when a helper, reflip or shockwave flips it.
There are upgrades?!?
You'd be surprised (or maybe not, surprise!) that a lot of players play the game for hours without ever buying a single upgrade. But not on purpse. Apparently it was that easy to miss ... I hope that the text scaling mitigates that issue at least a little. But to be very sure, the sidebar tabs now blink until you click them at least once.
Speaking of blinking ...
We've had some feedback regarding the wishlist button in the game. It kept blinking ... and blinking. Which totally distracted a lot of you. Sorry about that.
That wishlist button (as dumb as this may sound) is extremely important to us. Back when Gamblers Table was only available via Web it got stolen over and over again and being reuploaded to other pages and generated ad revenue for the thieves without us ever knowing.
Having this wishlist button was our only saving grace, because no matter how often it got stolen - this button always brought anyone playing back to our steam page! And we could see that it worked.
But having it blink all the time really is a tad excessive. So now it no longer does that and sits quietly and statically in the corner.
For anyone wanting us to completely remove it:
Sorry, but wishlists are super, duper important for small games like ours. Amount of wishlists is that magic number that steam uses to determine if you're in the charts or being sent to the shadow realm. The final release will of course not have it, but the demo will continue to feature the button. Thank you for understanding.
UI Changes
You may have noticed that the sidebar looks a little different now. That is because it underwent some major changes. Lets take a look.
Drag to arrange
We've gotten the feedback that some of you would like to see more of the shop, but also some of you wanted to see more of other things. You decide now! You can drag the separator in the sidebar to adjust how much of which you want to see.
Tactics
Looking at the GIF above, you can see that there is a new tab "Tactics". Before, the "Helper Focus" configuration was cramped into the lower sidebar window together with the buffs. The "Helper Focus" configuration has now moved into the "Tactics" tab instead.
There is also a new achievement for clicking that bad boy. As we have learned previously - not everyone clicks those! So wear that fish head with pride and joy.
Shop Item Buttons
The buttons to buy weren't really great. They had their information really cramped and their text didn't break that well if it was too long. Now the amount you have is tidied up in the lower right corner.
Stats Tree
Okay, so this one is really cool. So many of you wanted a "X per second" display. Here it is! I've completly reworked the stats tab and will now show you the money generated by every coin split up into the sources. You also get a cool bar chart to see what performs the best out of the sources!
Anyways ...
I could continue on and on about other smaller changes I did. Some wording here and there.
But lets look at some stuff awaiting you in the final release!
Those are some of the new skills you will find in the skill tree of the release version. Would love your guesses on what you think what they do! My favorite is the helper on a rocket ... Wonder what that is about ...
We regularly post images like that on our discord in the #progress-channel. Feel free to join!
I've made it my personal mission to greet each and every single one of you with a HI-reaction.
Thank you for playing!