Gallery redo: PATHS (Patreon)

Awoo!I had a busy and productive time the past few weeks, finishing the script for the ending of my latest chapter of A Demon Within Shelter, and cleaning up and polishing some stuff around some other parts of the game. PATHS got the greatest upgrade, and I think it's going to make the whole game's progression experience much cooler, especially for new players or those who are planning to start from scratch.

For comparison, this is before…

…and after.

I think I managed to put all of the most important changes in the image above, but let me just type it down again in case I missed anything.

One of the complaints I've heard over was that the paths weren't easily readable on some screens, so I bumped up the visibility of those connections significantly.

The other complaint was that it was too heavy on the phones, and this version of PATHS should be much easier on the hardware.

When you open the PATHS in the middle of the playthrough, the nodes you used in the current playthrough are not only highlighted, but also the connections between them are! So it looks super cool. Also, you see the PATHS screen of your current playthrough as the transition between Barkest Corner and Main Menu, instead of TO-DO.

TO-DO is now a toggleable panel on the left side of PATHS screen, along with the Barkest Corner/Mysterious Figure orbs. The positions in To Do are now buttons that, when clicked, the view should put you right on the node you should play next to complete it. In the future, it would be cool to make it possible to jump to those parts in the game through using PATHS UI, but that's not ready yet.

While TO-DO panel is active, the game timer appears on the top-right of the screen, and the total game percentage is on the bottom right. Also, I added a "Nodes to Explore" tracker showing you the number of available but still not explored nodes. Clicking on the number puts your view on the leftmost available node and makes it blink.

Under each label of time section name (near the main path), there's a small percentage showing your completion of that section. It also counts the hidden nodes, so if you still don't see it at 100, there must still be some nodes that will appear later.

The PATHS now show you only the next available nodes, so you shouldn't be prematurely spoiled on how complex the yet-unexplored sections of the story are.

I'll still work a bit more on making it prettier later on. I want to put more variation, artwork and stuff, but right now I'm just very happy about all of the current technical improvements. I know there's still a bunch of flaws that will come out in testing, so please report all of them in #patreon-bugs-typos and I'll get to them!

I hope you'll like it!

Your Dog,

Raus Vuffski