Holiday Announcement!

Season's greetings!  

As nice surprise, I was able to get the new UI up and running just before the holiday break! This iteration contains all the major updates to the user interface, in alignment with the previous mockup. For the most part, everything went off without a hitch.  

The only major element of the mockup that couldn't be translated over was the scrollbar. Apparently nobody told me that making an intuitive and responsive scrollbar from scratch is something of a herculean feat no mere mortal such as I can easily achieve.  

After a couple days of struggling with it, I had no choice but to suss up the pre-build component version and make the UI fit it. Ultimately a trivial loss, especially when you consider that the text area is now so large that having to scroll through it is generally uncommon.  

We can expect a few tweaks to the UI over time, but this covers pretty much all the major bases when it comes to the overhaul as a whole.  

Other than looking a lot better, not much of the game has changed yet. The game now has hotkeys and a page system -- found under the scrollbar -- which allows you to look back on previous screens, in case you missed something. The game also has other embellishments, such as coloured lights and text.  

With the completion of the UI we move into "Closed Beta", starting next month. From here on, it's all content and polish.  

However, between now and then, we intend to go on something of a "Deep Dive" regarding how we move forward with the existing mechanics and narrative elements. Early on, back when the focus was more on finding a suitable replacement for the Inform engine, development revolved around replicating the base game within Flash. Now that replacing Inform isn't really a problem, there's a stronger focus on what we can do better or differently here by treating this game as its own thing.  

For the longest time -- and this includes the original game -- we've been compelled to add content for its own sake, without asking how it fits in the bigger picture. Now, we don't have any sweeping plans for that base game, but this approach is the fundamental contributor to its patchwork nature, and it's something we want to avoid for this game.  

The dive aims to resolve that by laying out storytelling and mechanical rules in greater detail. Eventually, there should be a blog post detailing any major shakeups we intend to introduce as we move forward, as well as catching up non-patrons on the progress of the game.  

Until then, we wish you a happy holidays!