Ever since I first published the first demo for Afterlife Gladiator it has become apparent that the biggest issues with the game are related to readability. It's difficult to put oneself in the perspective of a new player when you are developing the game and know exactly how everything works. To me there is no greater indicator of this phenomena than the fact that I keep getting feedback asking me to add hotkeys that are already in the game, because of that I decided to create a simple cheatsheet with all of the controls which led to realizing how inadequate these were and thus I decided to rework the controls.

I'm a happy to announce that the combat is now fully playable with the keyboard. Essentially you have 4 buttons, each associated to a different action and then a combination of numbers and the arrow keys serve to interact with the sub menus. With a little tweaking I think I could make this playable on a gamepad, but that's not in my plans yet as I haven't made the arena screen keyboard accessible yet.

 Besides that I tried to improve the combat UI in other ways. I'm not completely sold on the icons, but now the speed slider is more intuitive and and the combat journal shows more useful information. Such as announcing when a unit is defeated or showing figures and targets for healing skills. This is still a work in progress as I would like to communicate other things still.

Besides that, items and skills have a specific look to them in order to make them recognizable at a glance. Also, skill buttons now show the percentage of said skill that the active character can afford with their current MP instead of the entire button being red. 

Another important component of readability that has been brought up to my attention are the status effect icons that show up next to characters when they are afflicted by either a buff or a debuff because I underestimated how much tutorializing was required in this instance I think. For the time being I have implemented a little cheatsheet of sort that identifies all of them, although it's not an objective, clinical explanation because I find that boring. 

Finally, early game enemies have received some balance changes to try and make them more interesting. I still have a lot to do in terms of refining basic mechanics but I have tried to avoid stalling on new content because of that. I think I can have 2 new levels in time for next DD, but only time will tell.

That is all I have for now that I don't want to spoil. I usually fix a bunch of minor issues every time I update but I find long lists of minuscule changes incredibly dull. I thank you for reading, my dear hypothetical readers, and I hope to see again in 2 weeks.

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