Keyboard Glyph support! (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

For the first third of this month I've been working on finally adding KB glyphs to the game. There were already glyphs for gamepads, but I've been postponing the ones for keyboard due to having to draw 100 glyphs (and more) for each possible button, but I finally got around to doing it, and honestly it was less tedious than I expected. So now keyboard users can see nice glyphs of the button bindings instead of the raw input text like before.

Related to this, I've also improved the input system to recognize and properly display keyboard layouts other than the default EN-US. For instance, AZERTY (French) now correctly visually swap the appropriate letter keys, and the same goes for other european layouts such as spanish, portuguese, german, etc. I've also drawn an extra amount of unique european symbols and buttons: how many do you recognize from the preview above?

For those european users, I've added a new advanced option that automatically activates this new KB layout detection system, so when the next version is released, please do try it and hopefully you'll be able to see the actual correct glyphs for the inputs that you've selected.

And as a natural result of supporting these visual KB glyphs, I'm slowly adding convenient windows containing button prompts across the whole game's UI.

You can see two examples above: One is the story introduction cutscene, and the other appears when Maya is defeated/fainted. They display glyphs for KB and gamepads, and these windows can be shown/hidden at will, providing useful reminders about the game's actions for each gameplay context, while not being a permanent eye-sore.

Aside from glyphs, the keen eyed will have noticed in the "retry" example above, that the button to skip to "bad endings" now must be held for 1 second. This change was done so as to avoid accidental skips, but also to permit players to watch the pre-BE animation to their hearts content.

Therefore, I've renamed the respective advanced option from "Allow Bad Endings" to "Allow Bad Endings to automatically start". When ON, the system behaves exactly like usual: at the end of a normal grab animation, the "bad end" automatically begins. But when set to OFF, bad endings will never automatically start, only when the player manually holds the skip button.

So this allows players to enjoy specific animations or behaviors that happen pre-BE, notably the DogBoy's walking behavior can now go on indefinitely (I just saw him take Maya for a walk across the whole city LOL), as well as the minotaur gladiator boss in the area, he has an infinite closed loop grab animation which many people didn't even know of, given how his BE interrupted it short.

As you can see, it was a ton of non-glamorous, under-the-hood work, but work that needed to be done nonetheless, since it provides some good quality of life features for many kinds of players. And as I near version 1.0, more such refinement and polish will come to improve the overall game feel of MKM.

Best Wishes
Mega