Eldritch 2 is coming to Steam! Please wishlist it here.
It’s been a pretty productive week. I did almost none of the stuff I was planning to, but made a lot of progress anyway. On Saturday, I spent a while revising the title screen to use the posed characters I’d made for proxy key art. I’m not sure if this is actually what I’ll want for the final title screen, but I’m happy with it for now.
Also on Saturday, I spent a while doing a UI audio pass. The UI in my games has usually been entirely silent, but it makes everything feel a little more responsive and polished with some little clicks and page rustles as the player navigates the menus. Then while I was thinking about UI, I implemented a proper version of the ending sequence and credits roll. I’m nowhere near being finished with this game, but it’s nice to already be able to test the ending.
Late Sunday night, I was watching some old GMTK videos on accessibility and I got an idea to try adding a game option to switch the HUD and menus from my default serif font to a sans serif font. On account of some of the work I’d previously done to reload the whole UI for switching languages, this turned out to be pretty easy to implement. I’m not sure if the font I’m using (Alegreya Sans) is necessarily more legible for players with visual impairments, but it’s nice to be able to offer the option.
On Monday, I tackled a handful of Steam Deck-oriented tasks. I’d noticed that there was a brief flash of a 100% white screen when launching the game, which was very ugly and painful on the brilliant OLED screen when playing in the dark. It took a surprisingly long time to track that down, because it didn’t seem to behave the same on PC, but ultimately I just needed to clear the backbuffer to black before presenting the screen for the first time. On my PC, in both Direct3D and OpenGL, it appeared that the backbuffer was initialized to black. Maybe it’s undefined, I’m not sure! But anyway, glad to have that fixed.
I also rebuilt my input binding screen to fit better on the small screen of the Steam Deck. It was previously one big column with all the input actions, and I kept having to make the font smaller to make everything fit as I added more actions. I finally split the actions into two columns, which was trickier than it sounds because my UI system is not the friendliest. (I guess I could also have implemented a scrolling list, but that would be an even more complicated task, and I’ve tried to avoid scrolling lists because they’re just never great to navigate with controllers.)
I got sidetracked with other non-Eldritch 2 things midweek, but finally got back to it today, adding iron gates, polishing up HUD markers and the minimap, and making some changes to AI faction relationships and behaviors to ensure that weaker NPCs and enemies always flee from unstoppable monsters like shoggoths.
