Devlog #8: Combat UI, Icons, and Accessibility

Progress Updates

We've been dipping into different things all over the place the last couple of weeks, making a lot of progress in various directions. Big moves recently include:

• Second narrative draft largely completed
• Combat button UI revamped to be mouse-friendly
• Creating icons for various game functions, particularly for item categories
• Early testing for screen-reader accessibility

Combat UI Revamp

One thing we're currently playing with (and probably going to proceed with) is a change to the UI for the combat options. I had originally conceived of the buttons as a kind of "combat wheel," which I've always enjoyed visually and found satisfying as somebody who primarily plays with gamepads. I was very happy with the look, but in action, I ran into two issues:

1.  There really was no fully intuitive way to interact with it using the mouse
2. Me and the artist had instant and opposite interpretations of which way a direction press would spin the wheel.

There are ways around these problems, but the sort of immediacy of issues with the design led me to think we should maybe try some alternatives, so right now we're playing with a more standard vertical layout, which should be intuitive and 100% mouse-friendly:

Icons Aplenty

No RPG is complete without a whole bunch of icons! This is an exciting development for me, because one of my major pet peeves in RPGs is when I get an item and don't understand even broadly what type of item it is, then have to go digging through my inventory to see it, which I can't effectively do because I don't know where to look. I very much appreciate getting a quick cue to tell me broadly what something is, instead of just going "you picked up a fauchard" and then laughing at me while I scroll through food items trying to find it.

To that end, we've been working on icons for general item types, as well as the sub-type of equipment slots:

Screen-Reader Accessibility

I've had a number of questions on here and elsewhere about screen-reader accessibility, and while I don't really want to give a 100% promise until I've actually built most of it, it's looking very likely that I'll be able to make this game blind and low-vision accessible. 

I'm building it in Ren'py, which does include self-voicing out of the box, but I've had to do heavy customization to include a lot of the features. As it is, most of the default self-voicing is either broken or kind of incoherent, and I was uncertain whether I was going to be able to work around that. After some research and testing over the last few days, though, I've found some options that look like they're going to let me customize enough to get it working. From tests so far, it looks like it should work.

That said, there are still some big design questions there that I don't currently know how to answer. How to handle things like turn-based combat and wall-of-text menus, where there are various visual cues all over the screen that may all change at once sometimes, is going to take some research to figure out. If anybody reading has played games that handle that well via screen-reader of self-voicing, I'd love to hear some suggestions.

Next Steps

I'm noticing a trend in my "next steps" update, which is that it's always "more art" and "add sound." Well, that's still the next steps. The art's chugging along, and sound is actually starting to take shape, though there's nothing worth showing there yet. More coming soon!

Thanks for reading!