Dev Blog #2 — Mobile UI Debugging
I've spent most of this stretch deeply embroiled in the mobile UI, and I want to be honest that a lot of it was unglamorous. Phones are an important home for the games, and a screen that looks fine at 1280px can be quietly unusable at 320px in a way you only find by sitting there with a small device and being annoyed by it. A few of the things that got fixed, because they're representative: The top bar was spending three rows and 158 pixels on four small readouts — Dao Power had somehow ended up stranded on a line entirely of its own. It's down to 112 pixels now, and it holds a single row all the way down to 280px wide. The bottom nav's expand caret went out, came back, and went back to the shape it had before, because the original was simply nicer to hit with a thumb. The combat log's label was eating most of the header on the beast-selection screen, so it's an icon there now. The battlefield picker is gone entirely — a dropdown you had to set before every fight, where the honest answer was always "whichever one suits my build". Fights roll their own terrain now, half of them on neutral ground. There's also a new opt-in compact fight selection for anyone who wants to pick a beast from its artwork instead of scrolling past a card apiece. Alongside the bugfixing I've kept adding content, and I've been trying hard to chase completeness and coverage rather than just piling on more. That's a different kind of work and it's the part I find most satisfying. The alchemy catalogue got rebuilt from the ground up onto a real matrix — there were pills at four different tiers doing the same thing, whole combinations of effects that nothing covered, and Qi restoration that didn't scale with your realm at all. Every element now has a pill raising its attack or resistance at least every other tier. Every origin now grants starting equipment. Every array plate and every talisman pattern can now be commissioned through sect crafting orders, where before that screen showed two array entries and no talismans at all — because the system only understood recipes, and neither of those is a recipe. Crafting discovery got the biggest rework. It used to be a guessing game against an exact ingredient list you had never seen, where a wrong guess cost you everything you put in. It's a body of study now: pool related materials, work through them, accumulate insights into the designs they go into. Keep studying something you already know and you get better at making it. And cultivators can finally leave something behind. At realm 8 you can name one possession a treasure and hand it down to your family line or your sect — its stats compound 10% every time it's passed on, only that line or sect can wear it, and it can never be sold. Win a sect war and you carry off the other side's most storied heirloom. I like that a family's oldest possession ends up being its best one, and that you can't buy your way to it.
I'm still very excited about this, and eagerly approaching an alpha for early access so we can start seeing the worlds come alive with actual people in them. Right now, I'm still aiming at a mid-to-late September early access date. The plan is for iOS, Android and Steam joint release at the same time. The game is fully cross platform so you can pick up your characters anywhere you want to play. Thanks for reading, and for the patience while I chase 18-pixel buttons around a phone screen.