Hello again.

Despite the exhaustion from last week’s Avcon I have just managed to get a patch ready before the new month. I would have loved to have gotten more done - after all I have been itching to work on Illic after all the wonderful feedback I received during the convention, but sometimes you need to rest. Pikmin 4’s release has helped me recharge quite a bit to allow me to get a great but small patch for the game.

The patch’s focus has been on the most obvious issues with the game’s playability: knowing who’s who and using hold buttons. 

Hold buttons now provide feedback when they are not held long enough and I have also adjusted their design to be more noticeable.

I have removed navigation in the Battle UI to prevent incorrect selections and to encourage (or rather require) controllers to make use of the shortcuts on the menu.

Health bars are now coloured to represent the team the unit belongs to. From now on you will be able to tell who is who even if they are almost as purple as the enemies. I have plans to provide additional visual queues to player controller characters, but the coloured health bars should go a long way to know who is one which team at a glance.

Other than that I have fixed a couple of miscellaneous issues such as the chests being killed by the enemies on the final map, appearance of the r2 icon when using a PS4 or 5 controller, the stats of an item dropped on the final map. 

Otherwise I have been working on gathering ideas for redesigns of characters and ui elements in the game and planning. I am trying to follow one of my favourite authors Haruki Murakami's idea of using feedback as a signal that I haven’t gotten things right just yet. So I have been spending a bit of time analysing my notes and converting them to issues for me to deal with later. My board feels like it is overflowing at the moment but all that means is I have a lot of ideas to work through. I am hoping to do as much as I can to respond to feedback from AVcon and make it that much easier to figure out what is going on. Either way I am hoping this version marks an age of more frequent builds and uploads - at least if this web build ever finishes.

Until next time.