Alternative Interfacing

Long story short: the above mouthful of a title is just our fancy way of saying that DD’s gonna get some cute little radial menus soon. Booyah!

This has been a long-time goal of ours for two reasons. One: we’ve always been meaning to build menu systems that are slightly friendlier towards touch interfaces (because, you know, we haven’t forgotten about that huge mobile fanbase awaiting us on release). Two: among the crew at QCF, I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who still insists on using pure mouse controls when playing the game. Seriously, I’ve broken the hotkey system about two or three times without even realising it because I really just don’t give a crap about that part of the game (very sorry, keyboard fans — one of the other devs will probably step in and give you those highly sought-after arrow controls before full release, though).

That said, I’m really being quite silly because mouse-only has some pretty heavy drawbacks. For a start, I absolutely hate having to go back and forth between the inventory panel and the enemy that I’m fighting. Really wrecks my day.

Hence my personal drive for the new radial menu, under the guise of a totally legitimate QCF Design advancement for the sake of control and compatibility across multiple platforms. Under this system, whenever the player clicks on an enemy (or wall, or other interactive stuff), the game will perform a quick scan of the items in the inventory panel and provide useful shortcuts to any that are applicable in the current situation: glyphs, once-off attack items and perhaps even humble consumables such as potions (depending on whether or not they’ll clutter the environment too much).

Need to wear down the Tower of Goo with a clustertruck of BURNDAYRAZ? Wanna spam BYSEPPS at a resistance-stacking foe? Need to quickly and conveniently nom a few walls with ENDISWAL to build up protection? Not a problem! These formerly tedious chores are gonna be a breeze with the new radial menus, maybe to the extent you’ll stop caring about keyboard shortcuts altogether (though this is much easier if you never started in the first place).

We’re not 100% sure if we’re going to roll out the new system just yet, but we’ll probably add an option to experiment with it soon.