Devlog Exo Idle Mining: Polishing the Experience and Refactoring Systems

Devlog Exo Idle Mining: Polishing the Experience and Refactoring Systems

Hello everyone!

The last few development sessions have focused on refining the player experience and strengthening our project’s codebase. We took existing features and elevated them to a new level of quality, ensuring the game not only looks and sounds good but is also robust and easy to maintain.

Here is the consolidated summary of our progress:

1. Audio System and UI Settings Implementation

We implemented a complete audio system, giving the player full control over their sound experience.

• SoundManager Singleton: To centralize audio control, we created the SoundManager singleton. It utilizes Godot’s “BGM” (for music) and “SFX” (for sound effects) Audio Buses, allowing for independent volume adjustment.

• Background Music and Controls: The main theme now plays on a continuous loop. In the settings panel, we’ve added volume sliders, a mute checkbox, and a language selection tab (including automatic system language detection).

• Settings Persistence: All audio settings and language preferences are now automatically saved and loaded, ensuring the player’s choices are maintained between game sessions.

2. Refactoring Visual Effects for Reusability

We overhauled our visual effects to make them modular and efficient, following the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle.

• Click Effect Component: The “pulse” effect when clicking on objects has been transformed into a dedicated, reusable scene, ClickEffect.tscn. This cleaned up the code in planets and asteroids and gave us a single point of control to adjust the effect’s appearance game-wide.

• Controlled Explosions: The asteroid explosion effect is now a decoupled component (ExplosionEffect.tscn). We added artistic control to the AsteroidResource, allowing us to toggle effects like shake, shrink, and fade, as well as adjust the explosion scale for each asteroid type.

• Movement Feedback: The space station’s destination marker has been improved. It is now a single node managed by the UI, featuring a smooth and continuous “breathing” animation that provides clear and satisfying visual feedback.

3. Quality of Life (QoL) UI Improvements

We made several fine-tuning adjustments to the UI to improve gameplay and information clarity.

• Large Number Formatting: We implemented large number formatting (e.g., 15.4K instead of 15396) in the inventory panel. This applies to both the item list and the selling section, ensuring large values are easy to read at a glance.

• Persistent Sell Slider: The sell percentage slider now retains its value, allowing the player to quickly sell the same portion of different resources without readjusting the slider each time. This makes bulk selling much more fluid and efficient.

• Precise Interaction: We reduced the size of the question mark on locked planets and replaced large clickable areas with dedicated buttons (like the “+” for adding managers), making interactions more intentional and preventing accidental clicks.

• Event-Driven UI Updates: We created a global signal, language_changed, which notifies the entire interface to re-translate itself when the language is changed, ensuring immediate visual consistency.

With a cleaner codebase and a more polished user experience, we are now fully prepared to dive into the next major system: Smelting ores into alloys.

Stay tuned