Beneath the Mountain
Week 29 - Forge, New Resources, & UI Improvements
Post-Alpha Fixes
The alpha version got a ton of feedback, and I immediately got to work fixing and making improvements!
Options UI
One of the most common feedback items I got was the need for an options UI: a way to control audio, video, and keybind settings. So, I made one. Everything on this UI works and is saved to your local computer.
New Resources & Notification UI
Next I added a new notification UI, that will show helpful information about buildings that have finished construction, units that have been trained, or orc army invasion updates. Right now there's only a few events that get sent here, but as the game develops, we'll be seeing a lot more information being put here.
Also, there's new resources! These aren't fully implemented yet, but we'll be adding the other buildings and things soon. From left to right, we have gold, stone, iron, food, and engineering parts.
New Invasion UI
After the initial feedback, it was obvious to me that we needed better interface feedback on when the next orc invasion would arrive. So, I've now added the new Orc Invasion UI, which shows an orc icon moving gradually to the right as the invasion gets closer.
The Forge
This is a building I've been wanting to add for a while now. It produces iron at a set interval, and is displayed in the new resources UI. There isn't anything to do yet with the iron, but thats coming soon.
Better Lighting
Another really common feedback point was the lighting. With the options UI allowing you to adjust brightness and contrast this should be less of an issue, but I took some time to make adjust the wall lights to improve ambient lighting.
Time Control UI
Another highly requested feature was the ability to speed up the gameplay (especially during the first few minutes). So, I've added a small UI in the bottom left to let you do this. There currently isn't a keybind for the fast forward button, but its coming soon.
Floor UI
Beneath the Mountain is meant to be played over multiple floors. You can go up and down using Q and E. Currently, there's no way to actually get to the lower floors, so players were getting lost in the dark by accidentally hitting Q and E. The Floor UI shows you which floor you're on, and hopefully can get those players un-stuck.
Better Mineral Clustering
I found that players were moving through the map rather quicker than I wanted them to. So, what I've done is give gold and silver cubes more health (and more gold value), so that players spend more time mining them. Additionally, I wrote this cool clustering function to cluster gold and silver more tightly.
Steam Page
I finished all the work for the Steam page earlier today, and after it gets approved, we'll have the game on steam as well :)
Up Next
There's still tons of feedback items I need to get to, as well as new features and some re-works of existing things. I'm expecting next week's updates to be just as numerous as this week's. Thanks for reading the devlog and keeping up with the game. Let me know what you think of the latest build (1.1.3), and I'll see you next week!
-Max
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