A Setback I've Been Postponing For a While

It's time; I had enough with Inkscape. Its quality has been decreasing with each new update. Speed never was its strength, but it has reached a point that I have to wait several seconds whenever I want to move the view with filters active. Then there are the bugs; for some reason, changing blend modes between layers stopped updating the viewport unless I use zoom in-out to force a refresh. Other problems include vector glitches - the image below shows what I'm getting when zooming in the rectangle on the left.

For extra fun, the latest update of Inkscape crashes while opening my latest Inkscape files, and this my friend, was the last nail on its coffin. Therefore, this week was all about finding a replacement for Inkscape. After checking out some alternatives and running some tutorials, I really thought I was fraked finding something as efficient and easy to work with at a decent price. Adobe Illustrator offers a complete mess of UI, while CorelDRAW offers a clumsy experience with poor Grid management, both coming at a very high cost to the point it insults hobbyists. So, I was forced to extend my search for less-established solutions.

Alas, fortune hit yesterday! Affinity Designer is a nearly perfect experience. Its UI is simply amazing and it has a very good grid management system. In a single afternoon, I became nearly as proficient using it as I'm currently with Inkscape, which I've been using for 7 years.

Affinity Designer packs all the features I need for UI design in a more convenient way when compared with Inkscape itself. Its only drawback is its inability to trace images, but I guess I can use Inkscape for that. I really thought that it would be an expensive solution, but its single-purchase license of less than 30€ was too good to be true! In other words, it costs roughly the same as a monthly subscription of Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw!

So, for now, I'm redoing some work using the new software, but since I'm now on vacation for the next 2 weeks, I  might have something to show next week.

UI Redesigned to Accommodate the New Mechanics.

I've been dwelling into the gameplay mechanics and redesigning some aspects of it. As result, I had to scrap the common inventory functionality trading it for the good-old-independent inventory system per character.

As I wanted to preserve the easy-inventory-management by displaying every character's inventory at once, a bulkier UI was inevitable. Unfortunately, its new screen space requirements went beyond the limited I had established: a limit of third of screen space. So, I had no choice but to make it flexible. Now, players can toggle between a lighter and heavier version, through a simple keypress. 

The bottom right panel is empty as I'm still undecided on its functionality. I'm thinking of using it for a quick way of repairing and crafting items, or displaying stats of the selected character. I'm still not sure. If you have any ideas, let me know about them.

Saturday Screenshot

It's time to share a night image of Underlair. The fauna morphs throughout the day-night cycle with critters spawning and despawning in specific schedules. Needless to say that, the difficulty increases dramatically at night as well as the rewards. The rarer trophies come from the rarest creatures, naturally.

It's important the player studies the biomes before transversing or exploring them. This information will be available in books and through NPCs

Notice how the UI gets dimmed and lightly tinted to match the close-by light source color.

Post Notifications

So, the "Follow by E-mail" feature of blogger has been discontinued, but I think I've managed to find an alternative to notify people via e-mail using OneSignal, which is a free push notification service.

Now, upon visiting this website, you should see a popup asking you if you want to subscribe to Underlair. Please, let me know if this is working as expected.

[Edit]

If you have an AdBlocker, you probably won't see the popup appear. Regardless, you can always use Twitter as an alternative to get notified.

General News

Welcome back! A lot of things happened since I last posted. For starters, I've made the PayPal donations amount public and activated google's AdSense for some extra income (give it a click!). Soon, I will also begin to donate to the treasury; I just need first to recover my monthly budget from the last investment I did by purchasing several Unity tools for Underlair.

One of the assets is visible in the image below, which provides day-night cycle, weather, volumetric lights and fog, sunbeams, and other features. Other changes are present in the UI. I've tuned down some colors and made the avatars' blood darker. I believe this works better with the game's dark atmosphere.

After contacting some 2D artists for icon drawing, I've come to realize that such a goal is currently out of my league. I'll take care of the icons myself for now, for skills, abilities, and classes, with the style presented in the image's bottom horizontal icon row. Yeah, for 10 bucks, I got access to about 2400 icons, which I will easily convert into vectors and modify them as needed.

Also, I've permanently disposed of my Facebook account and activated a brand new one for the sole purpose of managing the project. I was fed up with getting pointless notifications of everyone's personal's lives.

And that's all for now. Stay safe!

UI - Quick Update - Psycrum Pools Redone

Following some feedback exchange with one of the enthusiastic supporters of Underlair, under the alias of 'shoTgun', I've restructured the psycrum pool into, what I believe to be, a better approach for representing the levels of psycrym (mana) of each psycrum pool available.

The dark spheres are psycrum pools that haven't been unlocked yet, while the colored ones are unlocked pools. The large dented "sphere" or general psycrum pool, indicates the psycrum available in the character's body, which is the combined score of all unlocked psycrum pools. 

The general psycrum pool, is also the representation of the psycrum available for executing actions requiring no affiliated psycrum, these are called neutral psycrum actions. For example, executing a power attack with a melee weapon, will force the general psycrum pool to draw psycrum randomly from one of the 3 unlocked pools.

The general psycrum pool is always unlocked and available for executing neutral psycrum actions. In order for characters to access other psycrum pools, they will need to find NPCs that can provide the appropriate training.

Lore

"In the world of Underlair, most living creatures have psychic abilities, this includes wildlife, monsters, and even plants. All characters in the game (both PC and NPCS) are capable psycasters and can train any skill or ability. However, some may emphasize a physical approach instead of a psychic one."