Native Launchers | Patreon Weekly #137

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, Patreon Poll #25 just finished, here are the results for the specific type of levelgen additions people want:
Special Rooms:      87%
Level Feelings:       45%
Secret Rooms:       39%
Standard Rooms:  29%
Special rooms gained the strongest support by a big margin, so I’ll be focusing most of my efforts there. I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting them to get such strong support, so I’ll need to spend a bit of time concepting before I can share specifics about what I might change there. Level feelings also got some support, so I’ll look to make some smaller adjustments there as well.

Read on for info on the progress I made this week regarding the Steam release.

Native Desktop Launchers

The majority of my work this week went into getting Shattered running through native executables on desktop, instead of through a user-installed Java runtime. Thankfully, the wonderful jpackagetool has made this process pretty painless. Using jpackage I can now let players run ShatteredPD without installing java first!

These executables (plus associated files) can then be packaged into a .zip and sent to Steam! I’ve gotten Shattered running through Steam on Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu Linux.

jpackage also lets you create application installers (.msi, .dmg, or .deb), which I’m going to look into using for places like GitHub, so that direct-download users can install the game to their machine without Java and get nice things like shortcuts in the start menu.

Desktop UI Work

In the last weekly, I talked about giving the game a 640x320 base resolution for desktop displays. I’m now considering if I can get away with 480x240 instead, or something similar to it. The main advantage of a smaller base resolution is giving the player a bit more control over UI size and making it easier to adapt the game’s existing mobile interfaces in places where a new desktop UI isn’t needed or hasn’t been added yet. For reference, Pixel Dungeon uses a base resolution of 384x216 on Steam.

The main thing I have to address at the moment in terms of UI is the size of the inventory. I’d really like to scale it down a bit compared to what I showed off in previous blog posts. As you can see, at 1080p (4x scale) things look a little cramped right now:

For this week I'm going to be focusing mainly on that UI work, and implementing specific functionality for the game's beta at Steam Next Fest. If all goes well I’ll have the critical work for Next Fest done well in advance. I’m also (finally) sending off the second round of pin mailings today, so expect an inbox message about that soon if you’ve been a Patron since March 2020 or earlier.