Unfair Dungeon has a fresh new look!! This amazing new capsule art was created by turnip_juice. It has been wonderful working with them and I'm beyond excited to show off what they've created. Thank you Turnip!
Cosmetics
I started working on one of my key features coming into this project: skins! I started setting up some pre-defined resources for new skins and palettes and built out a temporary screen for switching them on the fly. It's working really well! Here you can see us switch from the Wee Goblin in Lovely Green to a Grumpy Frog in Autumnal hues. In my head these cosmetics will represent significant unlockables for players that will cross playthroughs. I want to make some fun skins and palettes that players will want to find AND I should be able to add buffs and shaders to them as rewards for players who take on some difficult challenges or get lucky.
Good Buttons
Over the past couple months a big focus has been visual, and in that vein I created the 'good button'. It's springy, it's juicy, it's a dang good button. Here you can see it in action.
Flipper
One of the challenges of presenting Unfair Dungeon is SHOWING that the player's inputs are passing and failing. There are already a lot of visual triggers to help players understand what is going on, but it remains (and will always remain) a huge barrier because it breaks gaming norms. I'm working on a little flipper visual that will show a coin flipping and the player's current combo. The coin-flipping aesthetic will hopefully start to bridge the gap from players controls to randomness, though there are some additional improvements I'd like to make.
Refactor+Testing
With a renewed focus on UI, I endeavored to begin decoupling the spaghetti of my main game loop by bringing much of the UI controls into their own scene, which new signals to help connect things together. Prior to this update, most (all?) the UI labels were getting refreshed every frame. This solution is GREAT for a lot of projects, but it falters when you begin wanting to make things more testable and presumably more performant. Unfair Dungeon is small enough that performance probably wasn't going to be a problem, but I thought it would be a good exercise to wire the UI to only updated when needed. This let me remove a bunch of duplicated code and a whole slew of new unit tests were written to help make sure everything refreshes on screen exactly when it needs to.
What's Next
Next up, I think we need to continue making some UI improvements. Things are looking a little janky and I think it's worth cleaning them up before we go back to dig into items and probably start thinking harder about narrative.
Thank you all for reading! Once again, please visit the steam page and wishlist Unfair Dungeon and go follow Turnip!
-Nuzcraft