Devlog #6 Communication through visuals
Hey everyone! The new gameplay still needs a bit of time in the oven before I'm comfortable sharing details about it. But I did not want to leave you without any information about our progress, so I thought I should make a post about a lot of small improvements we made in our visual communication and overall quality. Those who follow us on Twitter have already seen most of it, so if you are interested in smaller more frequent updates, feel free to follow us there as well!
We definitely cut a few corners in our initial alpha release because we wanted it to be done before the Steam Christmas sale. After we decided that we want to rework the alpha combat demo, we thought that we should definitely take the time to polish it up as well. One of those cut features was the ability to zoom in and out. It took a while to get it right, as it is not as trivial to do with a tilemap as I first thought, but I'm very happy with the results, check it out:
Another thing that got a lot of our attention is the timeline. I thought it is one of the most important UI element, as its job is to convey the turn order of the units, which the player will check constantly while making decisions. So we took some time to redesign it, and give it a nice animation so that the players can always understand how the turn order is changing. In addition, you can notice a spoiler about the new combat system in the gif. The game will have 2 phases in a turn, and you can see the phase change animation (Can you guess what are the roles of the 2 phases?)
In addition, to make the timeline even more understandable, we linked the information on the timeline to the units on the map visually and vice versa. If you hover over on the profile picture, the corresponding unit will be highlighted, and if you hover over a unit on the map, the corresponding profile picture on the timeline will be highlighted.
The movement got a big visual update as well. As the new combat system will be turn-based, you can see the normal and double movement range of your units.
Plus a small quality change with the movement, when your units escape from the map, they don't just vanish, but properly move off the map as seen here:
Another small quality of life update is that the captive has a new body pose, and animation when you manage to release him from captivity:
And to end on a strong note, I started to utilize the video card as well to create a better dynamic fog of war effect. While again, this is mostly just quality of life change, and will still receive some tweaks, but I think it improves the general feel of the game a lot. Check it out:
So that's it for today's devlog, and hopefully, in the next one, I can finally talk about the upcoming changes to the combat system in detail! See you next time!
