Reworking the Teleport Screen

Hello again.

I apologize for the silence (yet again) this past month. Things aren't ideal for me just yet and I wasn't able to focus on my game dev work as much as I wanted to. But now that I'm entering the 2nd month of this dev-cycle, I decided to shake things up a bit to give myself a motivational boost!

Specifically, I decided to rework the teleportation screen (please excuse the poor GIF quality). Truth be told, I had always planned to revamp it anyways, so I figured I'd go for it right now. At first, my plan was to do something inspired by the title screen of the game "Yoshi's Island", which if you don't know, has this cool 2D island that is displayed in a faux 3D perspective, using the famous "mode7" from the classic SNES. It basically billboards the sprites like mountains and locations, and the camera rotates around the island like that.

But then I felt like that was overkill for MKM and didn't fit the visual style of the game. So I decided on what you can see in the preview: icons on an old parchment map, matching the style seen in the intro of the game. This map will be accessible as soon as Maya reaches the castle at the start of the game.

There are a lot of neat things about having this map interface when compared to the previous user interface of the TP screen: it is more visually pleasing, is accessible earlier, informs players of places they haven't explored yet, serves as an extra piece of lore exposition and better conveys the whole space of the game's world. And of course, ultimately allows for fast travel like usual, but with the benefit of better and faster UI navigation when compared to the slow moving list of the old UI. It also tells players (when they click on one of the points) that they need to find the crimson scepter in order to teleport, so it serves as a little guide too.

This was a very fun diversion for me, which will also be a much more user friendly interface for players. It was a simple and easy polishing work that has huge benefits all around.

Now, before I return to the main development, I think I might rework another UI screen: the save/load screen. The main issue is that it's hard-coded to have only 10 save slots, with one of those being reserved for the quick-save and auto-save. So the idea here is to rework it so that players can create any number of manual saves, and give quick-saves and auto-saves their own tab.

Oh yeah and please do keep reporting bugs and glitches. The next release will already have lot's of them so keep the coming and I'll keep fixing them! And speaking of the next release, if all goes well the next version will come at the end of this month of May.

Best Wishes,
Mega