Double digits for weekly recaps! Yay! Some good stuff has been happening this week. A decent chunk of my time went into admin stuff like looking for a new developer, which has gone really well. But more on that later. The rest of my time has gone into designing combat related things.
Proving just how much I really follow my timeline, the first thing I did after some design was implemented the “inventory condensing” that I had earlier planned to be done in about a month. I realized it wouldn’t take that long and have a large positive impact as well as clean up the toolbar. Now your inventory is all on one window which you can now open with ‘i’.
This inventory change is a welcome change but not nearly as impactful as the change I made to the toolbar, which was given a major makeover! I scrapped the secondary toolbar. Now each toolbar slot has two items assigned to it – left and right mouse click.
The right click item is only shown for the active item. I’m hoping that players will be able to remember what is assigned to the right item by looking at the left item in the toolbar. If that doesn’t work out then I’ll have to rethink the design some. So once the next beta update rolls out definitely let me know what you think!
The rest of my week is being dedicated to continue my efforts on refining combat. More specifically, I’m working on getting timing down for the Oil Slime as well as adding a new attack. My goal is to get the Oil Slime to be a good example to build the rest of the monsters off of. Beyond refining monsters, I plan to tackle monster spawning which I will go into more detail next week.
Other than that, I might be spending some time helping get the new developer caught up to speed. However, I can already see I wont need to do this too much since he appears to be quite brilliant and very self-sufficient. I will give him a proper introduction soon.
So something I’m not entirely clear on with the toolbar change (and I’ve kept forgetting to ask) is, now that right-click is delegated to using a secondary tool… with a mattock in hand, how does one remove background tiles? Is that also done with left-click now as well?
Otherwise, everything is looking spiffy. Especially happy about the single-key inventory. =D
What I am currently going with is shift+click to interact with the background tiles. I think I’ll add this to the item’s tooltips. Also shift+click for interacting with things.
Or, if you don’t have anything in the 2nd slot while using certain tools, could just right clicking (to remove walls for example) work?
I still think tools should be 2 handed (and take up both left and right click) so that the right click is still how you interact with the background…
I like the inventory stuff though, its a great step in the right direction
You might be right about the tools. I think they should be the same as tiles and I think it’d be somewhat limiting to. We’ll see how this current version goes.
Regarding forgetting what’s in the second hand/slot: you could simply layer the tool icons with the right-click in the back of the front icon,and use ctrl or some unused meta-key to swap the icons briefly so the right-button tool icon comes forward, or maybe the meta-key switches the right-button tool icon from B&W to color and is highlighted behind the left-button tool. If you decide to go back to only 1-handed tool use, this would still streamline the experience by giving a “quick-swap” secondary slot that would be accessed by holding down this meta-key.
However, I do prefer having the right-button be a second tool though, and perhaps having the background selected by holding down a meta-key. The fix I suggest for the forgetting above with the icon-swapping would also be a subtle reminder since it’s making the point that the meta-key is selecting the “background” icon.