Devlog #52: Revamping the tutorial system news - Shardpunk: Verminfall

Well I'll be damned! It seems that polishing the game requires far more effort than I anticipated! In my defence I can say I didn't have any experience with it up to this point, so I am learning as I go.

I know that the game is feature complete. However, this does not stop me from expanding the work backlog.

But first things first: there were still directional animations missing, so I created some of them. Rogues now have up/down animations for throwing grenades:

I skipped the diagonal animations for the throwing. Seems like using the default ones work correctly when dealing with diagonal angles:

Also, I managed to fix some game bugs during my playtesting sessions. Man, I can't remember when I played something else than my game... good thing is that I am still having fun with it. I guess mostly because each run is slightly different, so this stuff does not get repetitive.

Here's one of the glitches I encountered. Two rats present on the same tile, one of them stuck in an infinite animation loop.

(Now that I think about it, I did play another game recently! It was Crying Suns, and it was amazing. Go check it out, there's a demo available.)

And here's the thing: during playtesting, I found a number of things that I believe need improving. That's why my work backlog keeps on expanding. But hey, I guess that's what the polishing phase is really about.

Anyways, even though I didn't plan to to anything about it, I changed the way the tutorial messages are displayed.

Here's the old way of handling them:

And the new one:

I didn't want the tutorials to take up whole screen space, so I put them on the side. The text has been split into smaller pieces that should be easier to handle by the player.

Hopefully this time I will be happy about the outcome and I won't touch this part of the game anymore.

What's next?

I need to work on the visuals for the loot points. The whole idea of the "scavenge run" demo mission is to search through these points, and I am not really displaying them in any way - they are simply marked by an indicator. Adding some real graphics for it might make the gameplay experience even better.

Thanks for reading!

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