Finished now!

Happy to announce that What we mend is now complete!

I produced the demo in my spare time from January to March 2022, took a break, and then decided as I had practiced making a game, I should practice finishing one. So over June and July I did just that and learned a lot in the process of tweaking, rewriting and generally expanding it.

The game is free, takes 20-40 minutes, and I have added a few accessibility features to make it easier to play. I hope you enjoy it.

Below is a quick rundown of the things I did to update and improve the experience.

Text

I’ve added a dyslexia friendly font, the option to toggle fonts, and a slider for varying game font size. The scale goes from small to VERY BIG for easy reading whatever your set up.

The text colour and background colour were chosen to be easy on the eyes. I didn’t add a dark mode because that would have been more effort, and dark modes are often harder to read than. You can look up Halation and dark modes to see the issues dark modes have with astigmatism amongst other things.

Controls

I have added support for using the scroll wheel in puzzles, and you can press the scroll wheel to open and close the game menu. Meaning the entire game is playable with only a mouse or trackpad. I improved the auto advance feature, you can adjust the time it takes for text to advance in the game with a slider or turn it off entirely. This auto-advance feature helps avoid repeated clicking/pressing. It stops anytime you are prompted to do an action or make a choice, but if there is only one option, you can click or tap anywhere to select it and advance.

Puzzles

You can now rotate any puzzle piece you pick up with the scrolling action on a mouse wheel or trackpad, in addition to using arrow keys. Also, now when a piece is picked up it gets translucent, and only looks solid again when you can put it down. So you have clearer feedback about when a tile placement is valid. Also, absolutely all puzzles are skippable now, even the tutorials. It’s chill.

Story

I almost doubled the length of it and redrafted everything to hopefully be better.

Sound

I didn’t add any, play your own music, be free.

Closing thoughts

I think that’s everything. As always with learning a new set of skills, now I have made an entire game, I think I know how to properly make the next one. Look forward to something new, different, and hopefully a bit smaller.

All the best, Alexandre