Opinions
Posted on August 31, 2016Everyone’s got one
We’re reaching out to our backers again for some opinions on the site! There’s a lot of discussion going on behind the scenes, and we’d love your feedback to help make our final decisions.
First up is a visual question: what size should our items be in shops and inventories? You may have noticed that items are shown at a smaller size, 75x75 pixels, than they are in the item pop-ups at 100x100 pixels. Pros: we can fit 6 items per row in shops, and it renders nicer on Retina displays. Cons: sometimes the text overflows into three lines and looks a bit odd compared to the other items beside it, and it doesn’t always render as nicely on non-Retina displays. Take a look at this screenshot (click here to zoom) comparing the 100x100 size with the 75x75 size:
We’ve also been hearing some requests for more space in shops. As we add more Characters with more shops, we hope the stocking problems will become less and less important. However, do you think the shops need an extra row? Unfortunately, we can’t do this on a shop-by-shop basis without changing the code, so it would have to apply to all shops. At the 100x100 size, this would mean a total of 15 items, which I think works out to a very nice number. At the 75x75 size, this would mean a total of 18 items, which might be a bit too many, taking away the need for dedicated restock hunting. What do you think?
Shazzbaa also pointed out that Recipe costs have made Quest rewards undervalued now. I’d like to lessen the cost of Recipes to offset this problem, but by how much? Half? A quarter? A tenth? The cost of Tools is purposefully very high, since they can be reused endlessly and on multiple Recipes; but I see now that means the Recipes ought to be far less than their resulting product’s value. What value would you suggest? (Keep in mind that this will probably not be decided by popular vote; I still need to keep many different behind-the-scenes calculations in mind when I make this change.)
Finally, a bit of excitement: Hoof It has the Easy Mode completed, except for security checks to make sure it interfaces with the site Shards & Attributes! I know you’ve been waiting patiently for this game since we previewed it on the Kickstarter, so I wanted to ask: should I release an Easy Mode-only version to play until the other difficulties are finished? (The difference between difficulties is more dance options - Easy Mode only comes with 4 dance moves. Medium has 6 and Hard has 8.)
