Kandria
Menuing
This week was surprisingly productive! I got all the major UI stuff done – something I thought would take me the entire month. There's still some improvements and polish to make of course, but everything's there and functional. Nice!
I'm still waiting on some sound effects for all the different UI actions, but once those and some additional effects are in it should be quite spiffy. Here's what was built this week:
Main Menu
The main menu is standing and saving and all that is working just fine. The above shows one of the effects I've been working on to make it more interesting, but I'm not too happy with it. I'll probably work on this some more in the coming week, and hopefully I'll find something that fits the feeling I want to go for.
Keymapper
Finally! The ability to remap keys was there since the first public release of Kandria over a year ago, but there wasn't a UI for it until now. The remapper is quite flexible, and allows you to remap pretty much anything to anything else, even if it's kinda weird like mapping jump to analog up. Whatever suits your needs!
Map
Another thing that's been a long time coming. The map should be helpful if you're getting lost! Besides showing you the locations of places you've been to before, it can also show where NPCs are right now, as well as your route throughout the entire playthrough! I still want to add some stuff to make it nicer to look at, but it is entirely functional already!
Shop
This, too, has been on the todo for a long time. Up until now we'd had a very complex dialogue tree that Tim put together stand in for a shop, but with item drops and all there was no way that was going to hold up. The new shop UI lets you quickly and easily sell or buy items, even in bulk.
Inventory
And of course the inventory needed a revamp too. There's now a preview of the item as well as a more detailed description for each of them in the lower left as you scroll through.
Tim
This week I continued quest playtesting and polishing, tweaking dialogue and improving the colouring of key dialogue text. One new thing though was adding item descriptions for the sixty or so collectibles currently in game, now the UI supports descriptions in the inventory. This was quite challenging, as it needed me to research into what some of the items were - at least to get enough of a hook to write some interesting flavour text. However, not all of them need to be factual; since I've decided to write them in the first person, making them the player character's observations of the items, there's space for some wit and wordplay as well. And of course, for those that have a gameplay impact (just the Consumables at the moment), I was sure to foreground the description of what they actually give you. Next up: fish descriptions.
Well,
Aside from all of that we've also been working on the Pro Helvetia grant submission material. We're mostly done, just need to run it by a few more people to see if there's anything we can improve on it. Then we're also working on Gamescom stuff, so that we're well prepared for... whatever will await us there!
Hope you had a good week, and see you next time!