DevLog #27 – Polished user interface and better tutorial!

Hello everyone!

I’m glad to be back from my summer break and to release a new patch for Skycliffs demo! Version 0.9.2 brings a lot of polish and I hope you will enjoy it. As always, detailed patch notes for the demo are available here, but let’s review together the main changes!

User interface

The user interface got a huge rework. I polished every sprite of it to make sure everything look consistent and nice. I also remade the icons of the current 78 items implemented in the game. That tool some time, but the result was worth it.

Also, I reorganized the interface of the different challenges like the lunar balls or the race. I think the new layout makes the different rewards tiers clearer. At the end of the challenge, I added loot animation (similarly to when an enemy die) to better convey that you won some rewards. The NPC will also recall your score after the challenge so that you can see how you did compared to the different tiers goals.

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Challenge rewards are still prone to be balanced further but there are now better than they used to be. The lunar balls challenge is cheaper too.

The map also got some improvements. You can now hover icons to show a tooltip and see what they mean.

The UI may still need some tweaks here and there but it mostly has its final look. Portraits and achievements icons are the last elements that still need to be polished as well, but I will do them later.

Tutorial

I added some “player ghosts” to the tutorial to show how to do things. Hopefully it will be easier to understand how to traverse the level and get to the end without being stuck at the very start of the game.

The dummies in the tutorial are now destructible! It is more satisfying and it better shows that you are doing things right when shooting and smashing. The dummies respawn immediately so you can attack them as much as you’d like 😉

Finally, the height numbers will now be hidden by default. Many people said they were kind of unnecessary and added a lot of visual clutter. If you need them, you can still turn them on in the accessibility options.

What is next?

We are getting closer to Q4 and thus to the Early Access release! I will now focus on polishing the in-game sprites (e.g. everything that is not UI…) and adding as much new content as possible. This means mainly items and synergies, and maybe a few enemies. Moreover, there is still a lot of optimization work to do to make sure the game runs smoothly. This patch also contains some under-the-hood changes for a future new challenge I’d like to add, so stay tuned!

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!