Demo Details | Patreon Weekly #138

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new Shattered Secrets! In this one I cover some of my concepting plans for shop improvements.

We’re also going to have an audio Q&A segment to next week’s weekly. If you’d like to ask any questions for it, please either comment here, or on the patreon discord.

For this weekly, I’m going to share the progress I’ve made toward the desktop UI and a demo at Steam Next Fest.

Next Fest Demo Details

I plan to have a demo for ShatteredPD up on Steam in advance of Next Fest’s starting date of February 22nd. While I’d prefer to just make the game temporarily free to testers (like on iOS), having a demo is necessary for participation in Next Fest.

I intend for the demo to include the full game content up to a certain floor. If the player attempts to go further down, they will instead be sent to a screen congratulating them for completing the demo. There will also be some UI adjustments in a few places to explain the game is a demo and that the desktop-specific improvements are still a WIP. Demo runs can also be continued from the moment before the player descends and will carry over to the full game.

I haven’t yet decided exactly how far the demo will go, but it will be somewhere between floor 5 and 10. 10 feels a bit overly long for a demo, but 5 also means the only region the player can see is the sewers, which is a bit restrictive. I may opt to let the demo go to floor 10 for now, then pull it back to 5 once the full game is available on Steam.

More Desktop UI Work

Since last week I’ve done quite a bit of implementing on the new desktop UI, including a more compact inventory panel. Here’s how that looks at the moment at 1080p with zoom at 4x (those who prefer a smaller UI can easily set zoom to 3x or 2x):

In that picture, the top right menu and hero info pane are fully implemented minus some visual polish (that exp bar is a bit bright atm), and the inventory pane is partially implemented and partly still a concepting screenshot.

I’m much happier with the 3-row inventory layout with thinner item slots. It’s more compact and leaves some extra room to include bag tabs and numbers for gold and energy. I may also look into adding a button to show and hide the inventory pane, and an option to have the desktop interface but with a regular window-based inventory. I imagine the option for a window will be particularly useful to some dedicated players who will display it using keybindings.

I’m going to be trying to get this baseline UI finished up during this week and will then make a public blog post announcing the game’s participation in Next Fest. This would leave me with about 3 weeks to work on some polish for the UI and extra features before Next Fest starts. Naturally I’ll also start to look into content for 1.2.0 during that time