0.8.5e1: Tutorial
Hey Drifters,
We know the game has always been a bit tricky to jump into, especially with the tutorial being sparse and features often changing throughout development. That’s why I’m glad to finally introduce the Tutorial in this update! A custom experience that will walk you through the early stages of building your floating town, covering the basics with dialogue and objectives.
Alongside the tutorial, we’ve revamped parts of the UI. We've reworked the notifications (since they often felt more like a nuisance than helpful info), and refreshed the Fish Farm UI to make it easier to navigate. Plus, we’ve squashed bugs, made other UI improvements, and updated localization across the board!
What's next?
There’s a reason we’ve been hard at work on the tutorial! Its dialogue and quest systems are setting the foundation for something bigger: the narrative! We’re currently testing small drifter quests, a larger story arc, and more. Sea you soon!
This patch is still in development and can be tested on the experimental branch to give feedback.
This is how you can enable the experimental branch of Flotsam. This will only work when you're not in a game:
1. Open Steam Library
2. Right click Flotsam
3. Select Properties
4. Go to tab 'Betas' at the top.
5. Select 'Experimental' in the drop-down.
Early Access 0.8.5e1: Tutorial
This patch focuses on making the game more accessible with the introduction of a tutorial and various UI/QoL adjustments to help new players start a floating town.
Tutorial
- A tutorial has been added, which can be started from the Main Menu. This custom experience will walk you through the basics of building your floating town, with dialogue and quests!
- Added the 'Tutorial Pages'. A dedicated panel for in-depth information on gameplay features.
- Removed old tutorial pages from the 'Survival Guide'. The 'Survival Guide' has now been renamed to 'Glossary' to better reflect its revised function.
- Added a '?' button to various panels. These will open the relevant tutorial page for quick access to information.
- Added various new animations for drifters in dialogue.
- Localization
- All supported languages have been updated to include translations for the new tutorial and tutorial pages.
- Fixed and updated several missing translations from the previous localization update.
- Fixed various UI elements that were displaying incorrectly in languages other than the default.
- Various other small localization improvements.
Misc
- Starting a new game will now trigger a dialogue asking to name the town.
- Behind the scenes: created a dialogue system.
- Behind the scenes: created a quest system.
- Changed tutorial video codecs to VP8 to allow for multi-platform usage.
- When the game is paused, changing it to any other speed will now un-pause it.
UI
- Added a Quest Objective tracker.
- Added dialogue UI.
- Reworked notifications. We felt that the notifications would often clog up too much of the screen and act like a nuisance rather than give insight into the town's state. Now, notifications no longer stack on the side of your screen. It's now a single line which you can hover over to see all previous notifications.
- Reworked the Fish Farm panel UI to make it easier and less confusing to use. The functionality has not changed.
- Various other UI improvements.
Fixes
- Fixed issue where deconstructing or upgrading buildings with decorations on them (housing) would not get done by drifters.
- Fixed issue where moving down with joystick in the options menu caused the menu to glitch shortly.
- Fixed issue where the Save button would open a deprecated save panel when there was no save to overwrite.
- Fixed issue where going into an overlay and back using DPAD would keep the color overlay when switching back to default view.
- Fixed issue with the producer panel where the ‘-1’ button incorrectly removed the first queued recipe instead of the last. Also resolved issue where right-clicking to remove a specific queued recipe removed the wrong one.
- Fixed issue where expertise points would get assigned on opening the drifter expertise panel with joystick.
- Fixed issue where resetting the camera to the town would not work when the game is paused.
- Fixed issue where the inventory top-bar would partially not have a background when you had too many items in joystick mode.
- Fixed issue where buildings would get insta-constructed when cancelling salvage too early.
- Fixed issue where where keys or glyphs would display as numbers when loading a save.