Menu Modifications | Patreon Weekly #59

Hey Patrons!

I made a lot of progress on v0.8.2 last week, and it will hopefully be going to beta sometime this week!

The last few weeklies have been about that new gameplay system, so I want to shift gears for a moment and go back to what’s coming in the next update.

So what about v0.8.2?

I’ve been spending the last few weeks working on all the various design and technical adjustments that I wanted to get into v0.8.2. Firstly, the main menu is getting some new buttons added, and some old ones cleaned up. Old is on the left, new on the right:

• I’ve added a new button for my blog hosted on ShatteredPixel.com! If there are recent unread articles the button will glow and include an unread count.
• To save space, the update notification and changes button have been merged. Changes will now say ‘Update’ and glow if an update is available. You can still click through to get to the changelog.
• All of the buttons in the top left corner have been merged into the settings menu, which is now a regular main menu button. 
• I’ve moved the ‘support the game’ button up below ‘enter the dungeon’ and highlighted it in yellow. Supporter purchases have been down since I changed the main UI in v0.7.4, so my hope is to make the supporter button more prominent without quite pushing into annoying territory.

Along with having new options, the settings menu has also gotten some design tweaks:

That new news button in the main menu leads to a dedicated news screen:

This interface pulls in a feed of articles from ShatteredPixel.com and displays them along with an appropriate icon. Tapping into the article shows a brief summary and gives a link to the full page. I really hope this improves readership on ShatteredPixel.com, and finally lets players know that I do more to engage them than just release updates on Google Play!

As for the game itself, as I said before v0.8.2 isn’t going to include any significant gameplay changes. I was mainly looking to add some interface improvements to the – just kidding, here’s a fifth equip slot:

Yep, I’m giving the player a third misc slot! One slot is now dedicated to artifacts, one to rings, and one to either. For a while now I’ve felt that artifacts and rings have competed a bit too much, and this addresses that while also widening build possibilities considerably.

Previously I was a bit afraid to do this, as it is effectively a straight buff to the player, but since v0.8.0 there is some room to make the player stronger, so long as the increased fun factor justifies it. The new gameplay system is being added for the same reason, more power and more fun! As always, I’ll keep an eye on the numbers and make adjustments as needed, for both this equipment change and the upcoming new gameplay system.