I focused on finalizing the UI this week. I never consider anything completely done; every new system, feature, and piece of content is good enough for now and will be refined and finished in the future. This was a beneficial mindset early on because it enabled me to make rapid progress and avoid getting hung up on minor details. But now, six years into development, it’s preventing me from finishing the game (one of numerous factors!). So, I’m pushing myself to work on items until they’re fully complete and accept that they’re fully complete and move on.
- Context Menu 2.0. The context menu that appears when right-clicking a cell was redesigned in conjunction with the recent changes to the Examine Panel. The context menu now allows the player to cycle through the entities in the cell and access the actions for each entity. This is more intuitive and faster than the previous method of opening the Examine Panel, selecting the entity, and then clicking on an action button. I spent way too much time rearranging the new context menu elements to find the best layout. The entity cycling controls were the problem because they didn’t fit nicely in a box along with the entity indicator (an image and text) and menu buttons. The arrangement that looked the best to me had narrow buttons on either side of the indicator to cycle through entities and menu buttons that were stretched to span the width of the context menu box.
- Tooltip improvements. Tooltips are now displayed for enemy ability listings. Missing stats were added for multiple weapon and armor tooltips.
- New bow and arrow damage calculation. Previously, bows only affected range and arrows determined damage. I revisited this after recently changing the main damage calculation and adding critical hits. I don’t know what I was thinking at the time. The bow accounts for the majority of damage done. Now, damage is based on the bow, and some arrow types add incremental damage.
- Finalized standard (non-magic) ranged and thrown weapon lists. I reused the custom importer I built last week to create the ScriptableObjects. Images are still needed.
- Stat clean up. Removed some stats and attributes that are no longer needed including Damage Reduction and Non-Weapon Ranged Attack.
- Finalized level advancement awards. Each time the player levels up, hit points will automatically increase and one ability point will be awarded. I started down a rabbit hole on this and fortunately pulled myself out before going too deep.
- Item validation rules for damage profiles. When I find a bug that could have been easily caught by data validation, I add a rule to the existing data validator. The validator checks all actors and items when the game starts and logs errors for each data issue it finds. I wasted time this week on a bug that was caused by a partially configured weapon damage profile. I added validation rules to prevent future occurrences.
- Bug fixes.
Next week, UI finalization will continue.