Seems I am on-par with my monthly updates.
First off, I'd like to say; sorry the changes to Revel are taking so long; but I can say a large part of this delay has been through prototyping and having the resolve to say:
"Nah.. that doesn't look/play/feel/sound/smell good."
Instead of simply saying "meh. its good enough" as I've admittedly done in some aspects of my previous games.
I take comfort in the fact, that as changes are made; fewer changes are made after the fact; meaning that we are gaining ground.
That being said, where are we?
Recently there have been some changes to planned control mechanisms, and UI.
A plan for the v21 to v22 shift was to bring a mouse/pointer/tap 'centric control system to Revel.
In practice this has proven to be a really horrible ideal; for all the reasons it was a problem in Morning's Wrath, and then some.
The main issue that plagued v21 was no so much a WASD/On Screen Gamepad control system; but that rooms were screen-sized only.
So I jumped the gun and threw the baby out with the bathwater; the bottom line is I should have prototyped it first.
Implementation of the mouse driven system opened the need for a lot of additional systems and resource data (map collision shapes, structure collision shapes, hit test shapes, etc.)
...frankly it ate a lot of time, and turned out not to play well.
This also coupled with the fact currently combat in revel has been a sort of slash-fest; it has felt as if there is a disconnect between the
player, and the absurd amount of control they're meant to have over the game; and the blunt controls offered.
I could go on and on; but the point is, 'we tried some stuff, some of it worked, some of it did not; we should have prototypes via simpler means'.
So now the new plans/systems have been prototyped and are in process of being implemented.
Here is a sneak peek of how things are likely to look for our next release; WiP of course:
Interesting way to layout your equipping slots, in a plus sign of slots over the human body. It looks visually nice and simple / uncluttered.
The hands are barely visible, and the center slot looks more like the waist than the chest, and the head slot contains too much shoulder. Also, I can't tell if the bottom one is for boots or leggings or if they are interchangeable. and I don't know if the two hand slots are both for weapons/shields, or if one of them is for gloves.
Though, you may want to scale the silhouette slightly down more (though that'll make the boots look more like leggings), but spread out the arms and raise the hands slightly more, to make it clearer what is what.
Overall, it doesn't matter much, since players are now used to equipment slots in general, and they'll quickly figure it out, even if you had each slot filled with question marks. :)