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Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Monday Update #4 - Combat UI and Usability

Hello!

This update I've focused mostly on working with Andrea to get the new combat planning UI in, along with some other usability improvements.

Here's a WIP shot of the new UI:


We're trying to reinforce the mechanics throughout each stage of combat.  To that end, during planning the damage type/armor type relationship is called out immediately, in addition to any other bonuses or penalties that affect your attack. In this case, Brasidas deals piercing damage, but that doesn't do any bonus damage against light armor. He does gain a damage bonus for attacking the rogue from the side (flanking), but takes a damage penalty for attacking her from below.

Andrea's planned out mechanical sequences for how these panels will slide in and out. Once the various bits are in place and animating, I'll get some more gifs up here for your ogling.

One of the other usability improvements worth mentioning is the actor outlining:


Not only is it handy for finding actors that are blocked by terrain, it also increases player confidence when it comes to clicking on the actors in the world.

Meanwhile, Bob's whipped up a bunch of new music and ambience tracks for some more of the story locations. Pretty soon they'll all be aurally enhanced! And Victor's still diligently fleshing out the end game narrative and writing more dialogue.

I'm going to be spacing these updates out a bit more than every week, as you may have noticed, just to keep the content interesting. Sometimes we're all in the middle of bigger features, and there's not quite enough publishable content for a decent update. Hopefully we can find a good balance between depth and regularity over time.

Thanks for stopping by!

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