Feather Trail · published
Happy November everyone! Fall migration is wrapping up here in Colorado and we're phasing into "weird duck time"; when the most interesting diversity to be found are the waterfowl.
With this batch of updates, approachability and flexibility in the control scheme are top of mind; expanding mouse support and aligning with more standard keyboard layouts. I want folks to breeze through the tutorial portion of the demo more easily. To that end:
Further adjustment towards WASD-friendly keyboard controls scheme, allowing WASD to both control the player and navigate all menus. The only quirk with this is text inputs where you now need to activate them with another button press, and either use the arrow keys, escape button, or mouse to exit them (since WASD can be legit text input).
Added mouse navigation support to the main inventory and tent interior so you don't have to key around if you're preferring a classic keyboard and mouse setup.
Left mouse click support for the crosshair and bird-in-flight timing minigames.
Bugfixes for aiming the mouse to look around, to make it interact better with keyboard player movement.
Speculative fixes for getting trapped in mouse mode on the Steam Deck.
Secondary to that is the other end of things— solving friction reported by folks who get far along in the demo and want to keep playing:
Shortcut buttons allow immediately opening the Map and Intel (phone) submenus, via the M (controller "start") and I (controller "view"/"back"/"select") respectively. Hopefully this makes navigation more seamless.
Feathers have their own inventory counter and don't count toward save slots; in the full game these will have additional use and shouldn't bog you down until then.
And lastly, some art:
Added closeup art for Plain Sparrow (Spizella breweri), commonly known as Brewer's Sparrow (the game is avoiding eponymous names); a common species of sagebrush and shrubland in the high plains of the western US.
Animated the Sunbittern title intro screen just for kicks.
Behind the scenes, I'm thinking about performance. Right now I've been adding logging to my own local playtesting to look for optimizations in managing all the birds flying around to protect framerate, and starting to think about how to pare down the load required on level transitions (sounds like this is a little slow currently on the Steam Deck and likely older computers).
That's all for now! Don't forget to squeeze a nature walk in this week!