Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Combat interface overhaul continued, bug fixes EDIT: more map graphics
Admin CavemanJoe – 2022-04-29 03:14:04 [Permalink]
Hey folks! If you go down to the woods I mean jungle today, you'll notice our neat new combat aesthetics. Obviously first you'll notice the little cards for you and each monster; I think these give the game some cool retro ambience, but they're not just for show. They stack vertically on mobile and horizontally on desktop, so if you're playing on a short screen (nearly half of modern laptops have only 768px to play with) then you'll be able to see more of the actual fight without having to scroll - and they now show the effects of buffs on ATK/DEF. I want to start adding more stats to the game fairly soon, but the old interface showed HP/ATK/DEF in a table which just barely fit horizontally on a mobile screen; these new cards can be different sizes if needs be, so we can cram as many stats in as we please.

As well as making the cards, I also fiddled with the textual side of combat. Previously, every combat page would begin with "~~~Fight!~~~" on its own line, and then "Start of round: Your hitpoints: x" and then another line of text for every monster, repeating at the foot of the page. I've done away with all that, so the text output from striking and buffs is immediately displayed right beneath the combatant cards (and Timed Combat meter if you've learned that skill) so the whole round's output should be able to fit on even the squattest monitor.

Furthermore, I got rid of the unintuitive cacophany of colours used in combat text; regular text output is now black, damage done to monsters is now green, and damage done to the player or companions is now red, so you can more easily tell at a quick scan how combat is going.

And speaking of companions, I fixed the bug where mercenary healing costs were way too high. Sorry that took so long.

Have fun!

Update 2022-04-28: I've added time/weather-interactive graphics for Swamp and Deep Water map squares! The shallow water ones will take a little longer; we use shallow water terrain to mean rivers or the shallow bits around beaches, and those need different graphics, so I'll have to figure out a way to figure out which graphic to serve, etc. Further update later the same day: I've added the updated River graphics, will specify some squares to be shallowish beachy water at some point soon.

~CMJ

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