The remaining 80%

My team of tester friends have been reporting issues for the last few weeks, and I’ve been busy fixing them.

They did not find any game-breaking bug, but they found quite a few issues in these department:

• Some puzzles were difficult to figure out due to some interactions not working or not providing proper feedback
• The UI display being a bit on the cramped side
• Some elements on the images seem like they should be interactive but are not
• Plus a plethora of small issues here and there

So what I did is:

• I added a dozen of new “items”, like the church, well, road signs, rubbish bin, etc… that you can inspect, read, etc…
• I updated the feedback on existing interactions to make it clear to the player that they are in the right direction and which step they could look at next
• I added missing interactions on some items combinations to allow more leeway in what the game accepts

One of the largest work was on the UI, which despite not looking much different had some large implications in term of internal changes, hopefully it’s for the better but I let you judge.

Here is the Kitchen before:

And what it looks like now:

If you are not feeling like playing the game of 5 differences, here are the main changes:

• The scene description (“This is obviously the kitchen”) inherited from the original text version of the game is gone, it was a bit redundant with the image and added quite a lot of text to read
• The description area is framed with more black over and under, resulting in more isolated sections
• The items in the inventory have lost their prefix (“a”, “some”, “a few”) and now have alternating colors to make it easier to distinguish them so they look less packed.
• The directional cross does not have the bottom white border anymore: Some people would not actually see it as a cross but would only see the negative space X symbol, removing the border apparently fixed the issue

And that’s all for today!