What's on the Menu?

To start with, the final touches on the level-model for level two have continued, as I found several more things that I felt called for fixing. Once again, I'm hoping that I've made the final such edit!

In addition, I turned to a final piece of sound-work for the level: the sounds of the living city outside of level two, standing above the under-city which composes the main of the level. Instead of the complex, dynamically-arranged sounds of the previous levels' surrounds, this is simply a single, five-and-somewhat-second looping sound-file: I don't expect players to spend much time in the area from which it is heard.

On the logic-side, the name and description for level two's "distant light" is now changed when the player reaches a certain point. (Specifically, a point at which it's reasonable for the player-character to easily see what that light is, and so name and describe it more precisely.)

And on the art-side, I've taken some preliminary steps towards the level's introductory cutscene.

Moving away from the level, the game's menus saw some work in the week just past:

I've been thinking for a while now about giving the player access from the main menu to their collected lore.

For one, it would be convenient, allowing them to read or re-read lore-entries without loading a saved game. For another, I have it in mind to give one last lore-entry--if certain conditions are met--at the very end of the game. If I do so, however, it might not be feasible for the player to access this entry from the in-game collection. Thus, it would be handy for the player to be able to access their lore from the main menu.

Plus, before a game is begun there is no player lore-collection to access--so lore is now additionally stored in an overall collection, which the main-menu button gives access to. This has the bonus effect of allowing players to potentially accumulate lore over multiple runs, should any be missed in a given playthrough.

The problem was that of where to put the button for new lore-collection: the main menu was already somewhat full. My solution was to make space by removing the "save" button, and to instead implement a new in-game menu that allows manual saving. After all, there's no point in saving when a game isn't underway.

For a while now, I think, I've been a little dissatisfied with the background art that I use for the main menu--specifically, I've felt that it's perhaps a bit melancholy in tone.

Thus, I've spent some time attempting to design a new backdrop. And a major problem that I kept bumping into was the layout of the menu: with the buttons centred, and an unknown amount of space to either side, I found it hard to design something satisfying.

Moving the buttons to the left would solve this problem: the backdrop would no longer be bisected down the centre, thus allowing more space given to a single image.

I hesitated to do so: I quite like having the menu centred, and there were some questions as to how best to place a left-aligned menu. However, as you can see above, in the end I relented. And I'm glad that I did: even the now-old art is, I feel, rather better shown without the menu blocking it.

As to the art itself, I actually rather like the design of the old art. However, reworking it to be less melancholy would be tricky, and fiddly, in part due to my--alas--keeping rather a lot of it on a single layer. Thus I've begun work on a new version, designed with the new menu-placement in mind--and using rather more layers this time!

And finally, Night River saw one more update in the week just past: it now has both full-screen support and a (very rough, and amateur) Korean translation!

That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^