Log 7/5 - Birthday Difficulties

Accurate representation of the past 2 weeks

So, its been a while. Sorry about that.

Taking a little bday break from being a productive member of society turned into mourning the loss of a loved one, wrestling with a computer upgrade to the point of realizing it's not much of an upgrade at all, and waiting a week or so for a real upgrade to come in the mail.

That said, now that it's finally here, this new hardware should really help with development, and now that things have settled down I can get back to working on DateND. In the meantime, the least I can do is share a little more info on the upcoming update.

First, Consistency

New GPU means smoother gifs yaaaaaay

As stated in the last log, these new menus are rife with triangles - a simple method of implementing some aesthetic consistency and theming.

3 persistent objects created on startup draw grids of triangles at 3 different layers in order to simulate depth when combined with other UI elements. These grids now fill the role of loading screens, windows, frames, and more throughout the game.

(Also while implementing this I took the time to add arrow indicators to show when a menu is scrollable, hooray for QoL)

And Then, Dichotomy

In order to help maintain a healthy disconnect between fiction and reality, the menus change to a dark theme during dungeon crawling. The only times dark windows are used outside of dungeon menus are within certain equip menus, which are still directly related to dungeons.

It's a small touch, but something just feels nice and otherworldly about having a noticeable menu change for a specific area or part of a game.

Battle UI

A splash of red on the screen and a brief change of expression when taking damage helps add a little more feedback on the player side to better match the enemy's visual damage feedback. And not to worry - they may be cropped out of these gifs, but the act meters have actually been slightly enlarged in response to reports of the old meter being a bit hard to see.

Speaking of meters, the HP bar has changed to a nice neutral white that shifts to red as it drains to help the player more easily gauge who's in trouble regardless of what part of the screen they're focusing on.

Now that the, ahem, "difficulties" are past, I can get back to finishing up the private test build, which was already quite close to completion, so please look forward to more news in the future! <3