Options!

Hey everybody! Sorry it's been a while since I had an update, I've been working on unexciting things behind the scenes, like working with Flynn to finalize our UI design and searching out fonts for use in the game. The good news is, while none of that was particularly worth sharing, the end result of all the work is! If you're a member of our Discord server, you might have seen some of this stuff already - if not, I highly recommend you join it! I share updates and host occasional polls with both patrons and non-patrons alike every once in a while, especially when they're too small to justify a post here. You can join up by either linking your Discord account with Patreon to gain patron status, or just clicking this link to join as a normal member: https://discord.gg/EH6tqqt

Enough of that though, on to the meat of the post! There have been a lot of minor updates to the menus since last update, so I'm not going to go into the old menus, you can see them for yourself when v.30 comes out. First up is the new options menu!

As you can see, we now have a much more complete menu than the old black-screen-with-white-text shtick. Ignore the last button. I plan on adding more button prompts, like in the upper right corner, to let the player know how to navigate the menu at a glance, as well. Next up is the controls menu!

The controls menu keeps the same visual style as the other menus, even using essentially the same window shape as the map menu (which was the first reworked menu we did, available in the last update.) Unlike before, the gamepad and keyboard menus are now consolidated into one, allowing you to view the controls for each much easier. In addition to this, while it's not fully pictured above, the controls for the menu are now completely separate from the gameplay controls, allowing you to fully customize your controls however is most comfortable. Now at this point you might be asking, why does the screen use PS4 button prompts? Surely the Xbox controller is more common. Well, my answer to that lies in the video/audio menu!

Many games will try to register what type of controller is being used and change the button prompts automatically to match - however, in my experience, these systems are extremely wonky and don't often work properly, which is why I've made the decision to make it a manual choice instead. This menu is very incomplete at the moment, and it could change quite a bit by the time v.30 comes out, but all of these options will be available - most of them are self-explanatory, but the Gamepad Style option allows you to choose between Xbox and PS4-styled gamepad icons, and the Button Prompts option allows you to choose whether the game will default to showing Keyboard or Gamepad icons whenever it shows a button prompt. Eventually the Audio options will have sliders that allow you to freely control their volume level, but I'm not sure if that'll make it in for v.30, it'll depend on how difficult that ends up being. Next up is one small preview before I end the post..

I'm not going to go into detail about this page - it's just a mockup right now, not actually an in-game shot - but it looks like there's something new here I haven't talked about before..

I have some family visiting soon, so I might not be super active for a bit, but I'll try to get as much done as possible to avoid delaying v.30 even further. It definitely won't make it before May, though, sorry about that - I'll be sending the update to everyone who's pledged during its development, so if you choose to cancel your pledge now, I understand, and you'll still receive the update once it comes out. With that said, hope you're all having a great day, and thank you so much for the support! See ya next update!

-A42