Scratching the Itch

I've been buying various graphical assets for this game mainly due to the fact that I have all the artistic talent of a rock. One of the artists who I have purchased some assets from recently release his own game, and I thought I'd download it and give it a play. Going to be really honest. I don't know what I'm supposed to do in the game really, and I have no idea how to navigate around it. There's seemingly two sections, one where most th4e the "you're involved" stuff happens, and another where you sort of get to see the results of your efforts. And I tried. I really did. But I have no idea of what's fricken going on. The part where you're supposed to do stuff seems wishy-washy, but okay. Then there's the other part, but that's a nightmare. Nothing seems to make sense, and I actually (twice) had to restart the app as I could not find a way to get from the second part back to the first "doing" part. I've left that super super vague as I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings, but I re-learned a rather important lesson today.

If the user-interface doesn't make sense without any effort, it needs to be improved. The UI has to be intuitive and an action that the player wants to do both needs to be obvious, but also logical.

So, with that at the forefront of my mind, I circled back to the inventory screen and tidied things up. I have had a half-finished interface for splitting stacked items up there for ages, and it was always "not-quite-there" but also good enough not to crash if you did the right things in the right order. Time to clean up. I worked out a way to limit the values to split stacked items into numbers that made sense (can't split a stack into a larger stack than it is, can't split it to less than zero, can't split an item if you don't input a value at all) and added a lovely slider that makes splitting the item even easier. The most satisfactory part of that only just pipped the satisfaction of closing a few browser tabs I've had open for probably close to a year, that had direction on what I needed to code up to make that function. They've been open since I started that section, and somehow moved off it and onto other things. Anyhow. Done now.

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