Weekly Update from the Chamber of Pits

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Earlier today I noticed my Facebook feed had some Rebecca Black links again. It could only mean two things: first, the current state of pop music is appalling, and second, it’s Friday and therefore it’s time for another weekly update!

On last update we mentioned some new tweaks on the GUI and now I’ve got a screenshot to illustrate the matter:



So, what we essentially did was merge the portraits and attack buttons into one area instead of having them spread out in two opposite corners. Now you can access inventories of the characters, do some attacking and spell casting or shuffle the marching order all from the same area. To get there, Petri and Juho spent days talking only in a strange language that consists solely of numbers and single letters:

“X?”

“152.”

“Y?”

“Y? … 10.”

So, to those of you who have been saying that the UI spread across both corners is stupid, I raise my hat to you sirs. You have been right all along! 🙂 Even if it took a lot of iterating to get all the pieces to fit together perfectly, this layout is much better to use.



We also made the pressure plates (you know, the pads on the floor you can place items on or walk over) larger. It’s a change that unfortunately looks a little silly compared to the old, smaller plates but the trade-off was necessary since we need the player to be able to pick up items off of the pressure plate easily if he stands in the same square. This just goes to illustrate that often in game development there are no perfect solutions and that gameplay and functionality should be more important than the quality of visuals (or at least this is how it definitely is for us, I’m not making any comments regarding “mainstream games” ;)).

Also, we’ve been working on dozens of small icons but we’ll talk more of those a little later.

And finally, as some of you might have noticed, we’ve been struggling in keeping these pages online reliably and earlier today we exceeded our host’s bandwidth limit again (during the last 30 days we’ve had over 270GB of traffic). I know, it’s a so called “positive problem” but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything about it so we’re going to migrate to a more solid and scalable hosting solution within the next few weeks… If you want to you can hurry us up if you make the problem more critical by increasing the load of the site by, for example, spreading the link everywhere! 😉

And hey, currently it seems that next week we could be ready to tell you something regarding the release of the game but we’ll have to wait and see! Have a good weekend everyone. 😀