Progress Report - UI Overhaul! (Patreon)

Hello everyone! Over the past month, we have been working hard on improving our user interface and the general quality of the gameplay, in order to bring you a smoother experience. And now, it's time for us showcase some of the improvements we've made so far!

For starters, we have updated the native screen resolution of the game from 1280x720 to 1920x1080, which allows us to create a more dynamic and intuitive system. This also enables us to increase the size of the battlefield grid to create a more fun, challenging, and in depth experience.

And when it comes to menu navigation, we feel it's important that every screen is presented in a clear and easy to read way, cutting down the amount of input needed to navigate through it.

Structure is an important aspect to any game interface, especially when it comes to ease of access, but we also need to keep diversity in mind.

This was a hard lesson for us to learn during these past few months, which in the end lead to the decision to overhaul large parts of the menu structure and layouts in the game.

One of the first screens you'll see upon starting the game is the main status menu, who has undergone a redesign from the old version.

We decided to go with a more open structure compared to the cluttered old design, which while serviceable, isn't nearly as easy to navigate or as appealing to the eye as the new design.

And here is exactly what we meant when we said by having too much going on. Instead of having two tabs on a single screen like what we had before, it is better to put everything in a single window to reduce the amount of clicks one has to go through.

The weapon modification screen you see here is what kickstarted this whole UI overhauling process.

Upon inspection, we feel that it takes way too many clicks for players to through the weapon modification menu, which is why we opted to provide all the necessary information in one place.

So now you can do all your weapon modifications from a single screen, without needing to have the specific weapon equipped.

Besides the abovementioned improvement, we've also added two new features to further improve menu navigation. The first being "Combo boxes", which will change its size, becoming either larger or smaller depending on the amount of mods in your inventory.

The second being unique icons for all the mods, items, and skills, which should make it easier to tell which is which without having read the text description.

On an added note, we have also begun to add new parameters for the weapons. Our goal is to ensure that each weapon can provide more diverse/unique playstyles, instead of just having different stats from one another. This is still very much a work in progress, however, and we'll discuss the new weapon parameters along with some general combat changes in a later post when the time comes.

And one last thing before we go, here's a sneak preview at our new main menu: it's the cover image of this post!

This is pretty much final save for a few elements which will be animated, and you'll have the chance to see it for yourselves when the next update finally hits.

And that's all we have to showcase today! Please stay tuned as we reveal more exciting new changes in the upcoming update!