Switching to first person perspective

I started writing this post but then it kept morphing more and more into my experiences with ADHD while doing gamedev, so I wrote about that instead on my own blog.

To continue from that post, yesterday I moved away from one of the Slay the Spire paradigms, which is showing the protagonist on the left of the main screen. This trope has been copied by quite a few roguelite deckbuilders like Griftlands, Roguebook, Across the Obelisk and more. It’s a well-tread approach, which works even better when having multiple characters and/or positioning elements.

Unfortunately Hypnagonia doesn’t have any of these, and as I kept working on the GUI, I kept thinking that having the dreamer occupying 1/3 of the screen, while one never needs to interact with them during the game (and I don’t plan to have any fancy animations either), is probably a waste of screen real estate.

If anything, the dreamer does not even have a specific avatar, like one does is StS or other game, being a nebulous representation of oneself in dreams.

So for a while now, I was thinking of switching so that the dreamer is not visible and rather only their stats and conditions are visible. I hadn’t convinced myself it was worth the effort, as I would need to refactor the dreamer combat entity and maybe I could use it in the future.

But recently a new artist joined the team who started putting out some excellent character art for Torments (wait for next post), which unfortunately were too small to distinguish using the normal torment sizes I had until now. And when I tried to increase the texture sizes, suddenly I was running out of space to the right.

So that convinced me to give the first person perspective a try, and I think it actually looks quite nice.

Plus, no need to look at the ugly dreamer icon anymore. In fact, I don’t think using icons for the various torments ever worked that well, so I decided to rip them out and replace them with their artbreedeer illustrations as placeholders instead. Hopefully we can have the relevant character art soon.

As it was a fairly big refactoring for a crucial part of the game, there’s always a chance a bug sneaked in. A lot of them were already caught by the tests, but if you notice something weird, do let me know.

And of course, tell me what you think of the new layout!