Hi all! The second closed testing phase has drawn to a close. While running CT2, we simultaneously continued work on new systems, new content, and fixing issues on our backlog. Trying to work on the game while running live-ops turns out to be really tough! Admittedly, we didn’t find ourselves with a ton of time to post devlogs, but now that CT2 is over, here we are again.
Today, we’re showing an early prototype of our reworked HUD, Inventory, and Vault. As always, I’ll drop the video below, and then we’ll discuss a few parts in more detail.
The driving force behind changing the HUD is our desire to open up more screen-space. It’s harder for us to design fights and environments when a large portion of the screen is occluded. Many games solve this problem by tightly binding UI elements to screen corners, and using transparency to avoid blocking vision of the world.
For this reason, we moved resource bars into the top-left corner. After playing lots of games researching other bullet hells, we found that this was a common, comfortable place in the player’s peripheral vision for health, mana, and other resources.
We also began working on the new inventory, which was built around the usage of swapouts. We intend to design items that have specific, niche uses, emphasizing the player’s choice of weapon for a given encounter. For this reason, each equipment slot now houses a loadout.
Within each loadout, players will hold swapouts for their equipment. Using hotkeys (by default, 1, 2, 3, and 4), they can cycle through a loadout, and quickly change their active weapon.
We’re excited to see people switch items to quickly clear out a room of weak enemies, switch back to hit a fast-moving boss, and then switch again to max out their DPS on a loot chest. There’s a lot of room for skill expression here.
Naturally, since these loadout slots are limited by equipment type, we’re going to need a new place to put all of our loot. While inventories did function as a place to hold swapouts, more often than not, they also served as a place to hold your extra gear that just barely didn’t fit into your Vault. So we’re making our Vault more like the Stash in Path of Exile.
The new Vault features several tabs, and each tab stores up to 45 items (which is just a little bit more than the eight items in legacy). Tabs are renamable, and easily organizable. Items can also now be looted directly to your Vault.
We’re still working on the rest of the HUD—the minimap that you see in these previews is a prototype, and we plan to completely rewrite the chat system, since it’s currently terrible. All of this is subject to change as we listen to feedback, and as we continue to play the game ourselves.
That’s all for now! In the next devlog, we’re hoping to show some of those “items with strong identities” that I talked about in the video. If all goes according to plan, that devlog should be up next week… ish.
Thanks for reading. Head on over to our Discord chat @ https://playbtn.com/discord for a chance to win a registration key!
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