Weekly Update/Previews (Patreon)

Because Twitter is uhh... Bad, this idea was suggested by Graeme Cracker on Patreon. Well, actually it's a little more than the original suggestion. I thought it would be a good opportunity to add on a little more for supporters in general. So this will be a (hopefully) weekly recap of the things I posted on twitter, along with a bit more preview information than can/would put up there due to the character limit or just wanting to be a bit more secretive over there. 

While I'm not very consistent on how often I post preview stuff in general, this might lead to me having a bit more motivation to put more out there.

So let's go ahead with the last week!

13.1 update

Much of the first week of this month was spent on bugfixing for the release of 13.1. It's an unfortunate truth that most initial versions release with a non-zero amount of bugginess. 13 wasn't an exception. This means that I also then have to essentially borrow time from the next update cycle in order to fix the mistakes of the previous update cycle. Not ideal, but it's a difficult issue to fix on my own. Even if I were to be more rigid in locking down code and spending time exclusively on bug fixing, I would still be limited to only things from my perspective. There are hundreds of different interactions between different effects at this point. Testing all of them isn't really feasible. I guess it's just a limit of single person indie game development. It is what it is.

In any case, there are still a couple of bugs even in the 13.1 version. Allies only open chests while on explore, and monsters don't attack an ally if the ally doesn't attack first. Neither of these issues are big enough that I'm going to jump to do anything about them, but they are unintentionally making the game easier.

Aside from that, I'm still getting sporadic reports of crashing, as well as one person saying that they for some reason haven't been able to get the Liquid Latex Construct to be added to the research notes list. I have my eye on these things, but haven't heard any more detail that gives me much of anything to look into. If you have similar issues (or others beyond this), do let me know.

As for the image itself, it's almost entirely unrelated to the update. This is simply one of the generic sex CGs that can appear for Raine when the sex status effect is applied. I've definitely noticed that I get more likes on tweets that include nakedness (y'know, from 1-2 normal likes to 6-7 or so).

Compact UI

Around the time of the release of Alpha-13, I was getting more comments and discussion on people's opinions of the UI. More than many other things, UI suggestions are something I try to take seriously. While I doubt I'll be able to make the UI perfect for everyone's subjective experience, if it only makes sense to me, that isn't any good at all. I'm not the intended audience, after all.

So comments from the audience were saying that the UI can feel a bit cramped when all of the different popout windows are expanded. This is less of a problem at larger resolutions, but I was the one that chose to support all the way down to 1280x720, and I'm sticking to it. 

While every individual window can potentially have valuable information, not really being able to see what's going on in the map itself is a problem. Taking some suggestions from people talking about it, this image is what we have so far.

So first off, the compact UI mode is an option in the options menu. If you don't have a problem with the current layout, then this is pretty unnecessary (unless you end up liking this better I suppose). Selecting compact mode can be done whenever, and switches just a few things to clear up some more screen real estate.

Along the bottom of the screen, the stat windows change to only show the negative stats of each ally. While this does mean that you don't have the ally's working stats available at a glance, you can still open the full stat page by clicking anywhere within their stat window. Beyond that, most of the time you would want to know a character's working stats in order to predict combat or disarming, and that information can be gleaned instead from the room information window.

I decided to split the room information window, rather than having it drop down as low as it needs to in order to show everything (which can be quite a bit if you have a monster/trap room with all three allies inside). The half on the left is basically unchanged from before, showing the type of room you have selected and any threat inside. The right panel is then designated for showing ally combat/disarm counters, only appearing for rooms with threats inside to give you combat forecast information. Honestly, this kind of ends up being... Not very compact at all, since it makes what was one window into two, but the idea is to give a larger area of map visibility, so I hope it's fine.

Beside that, there is the top right turn count window. In this one, the floor number has been removed, as that information is not particularly relevant when you're just trying to clear the floor. In addition, the ally's special skill activation button has been moved up here as well. Although this may be somewhat out of the way, I felt as though I had to put it somewhere, and I had already decided I wanted to remove the row of buttons from the stat window. Putting this button up in the top right at least matches up with the ally that is taking their turn, and thus is the only one that can activate their special anyway. I suppose it's also worth pointing out that an ally's special skill can also be activated from their left click orders menu, though that's always been the case.

But that's about it right now for compact mode. I suppose I could also do something to decrease the size that the left side event list takes up, but I'm not sure if I want to do that. Partially just because that UI is the earliest one I made, and thus... Kinda badly structured in various ways. 

People will have to let me know what they think I suppose. UI is probably going to be an ongoing process for the rest of forever, so iterating on it between feedback is fine.

However, time spent on UI polish is time not spent on content, which is always the big killer for updates. There's never enough content, and it doesn't help that writing it is more difficult than fiddling with different mechanics and whatnot, making it easy for my brain to justify doing the latter when I probably should work on the former.

Speaking of which...

Lucette Reclamation of Nature cg

I don't actually have a lot to say about this one, but it is content. Again going for a nakedness CG. Someone guessed that it was a scene tied to the Exhibitionism curse, which I can understand, but actually no. This is for Reclamation of Nature (actually, I guess it could be both, but the scene I have in mind makes more sense with the former). There's another CG to go along with this one that I've already put together, but I haven't fully written the scene's actual text. We'll see where it goes.

And that's it for this week. With 13.1 out, I'll hopefully be able to get down and working more on the next update. Stay tuned.