A Rift with a shape: keystones, rerolls, gem shop and cash-out

Between the big systems there are weeks of “this feels off” fixes. Here are the ones that taught something, from 16 to 18 October.

Small things that matter

• Cursors. Four pixel-art cursors (arrow with a garnet, a white-hot arrow over buttons, a sword over monsters, a gauntlet hand over loot) are hardware cursors scaled with the window, so they cost nothing and never lag. The character also faces the cursor while walking now, and F picks up the nearest item (hold it to empty a pile).
• Level-up cards vanishing. In the Rift, a stray Space (dodge) or Enter “clicked” the focused first card and the run continued with an upgrade you never chose. The level-up screen now owns the keyboard while open, swallows every key before the GUI sees it, acts only on 1 to 9 and R, and ignores input for 0.45 s after appearing. The first version of its test passed for nothing, because Input.ParseInputEvent delivers nothing headless; pushing events through the viewport does.
• A settings panel that stayed the same size. A tab container sizes itself to the open tab, so a long toggle on Display made the panel jump from 600 to 728 px. Measuring hidden tabs fixed it at 720.
• The launcher asks where to install, shows free space, adopts an existing folder and catches unwritable folders before downloading.

Town walks that don’t get stuck

Clicking a station in the town directory walked you there, but often into something. The navigation mesh was built from floor cells only, so stalls and decorations didn’t exist for it. The fix reuses the realities’ monster technique: a distance field per station on a 16 px grid whose blocked cells come from physics queries with the player’s own circle. The grid is offset half a cell so one-tile doors have a free cell down their middle; without that, every door in town is closed. A minimap and a full-screen town map (M) came along, each station with its own icon, and clicking one starts the walk.

A Rift with a shape

The owner’s requests for the Rift, built together (run):

• A character with skills enters at level 1 with no supports and picks a start card; a skill-less character is offered three skills of its class. A bug on the way: a character level-up mid-Rift rebuilt the loadout and wiped the run’s skills.
• Keystone cadence: lesser keystones at 5, 15, 25…, great ones at 10, 20, 30…, nothing in between.
• Offer composition in one table: skill, power-up and support categories per card, with at least one skill card guaranteed. Measured: 57 % skills, 32 % power-ups, 11 % supports. New power-ups include an energy shield stat that takes hits before life.
• Per-card rerolls (a button under each card, or Shift+1/2/3), two per run.
• Pending items: a reward that finds the bag full goes to an account-wide overflow that shows as a stash tab and a hideout banner.

The bot showed the ascendancy clearly (damage taken down about 5x) and that a level-20 character wins every time, which means the Rift does not scale with character level, an open question left for the owner. Then the owner asked for a denser Rift: spawn rate and alive cap gained a quadratic term, swarms come every 60 s shrinking to 30 s, and from 4:00 a second ring of another kind joins.

A UX review, then three builds

On 18 October a planning session turned four owner requests into plans from fresh captures. Then they were built.

Instant tooltips. Orb buttons used Godot’s built-in tooltip, which waits half a second and restarts when the mouse moves, while our item tooltips show on the first hover frame. A themed tooltip now shows on the very frame the mouse enters, used across orbs, seal, dust, HUD and more; disabled buttons keep their mouse filter, so an orb you have none of explains where to get it. A headless window has no pointer, so the proof is a capture.

Odran’s Skill gems. A second tab sells all skills and supports by character level, with locked rows greyed, filter chips and “Only what I can buy”. Three new skills fill gaps: Frost Shards, Storm Strike and Glacial Hammer. The review also found that the ascendancy altar’s “Become a…” is permanent and took one click, so it now asks twice.

The Rift’s cash-out. The Colossus kill now holds the director for 1.2 s and asks: take the reward now, or keep going into the endless phase. The portal and Esc open the same panel later. A HUD panel shows the reward tier and the way to the next, with V and up adding guaranteed Rare cards and then Ascendant Orbs. In co-op it is a 15 s party round, silence counts as leave. The bot takes the reward at the kill, so balance numbers stay comparable. One test lesson: a scene added under a test node that never pauses never pauses either, so Rift checks use a pausable holder.