Post-playtest fixes: fight UI and onboarding
2026-04-23
Spent the day responding to everything the Sandbox playtest surfaced. On the fight screen, the commit flow is now explicit: a Cast Spell button appears after a move when a spell is selected, and a Cancel Move button shows up when a hero has moved but not cast — cancelling reverts the move and keeps the spell selection intact. Switching away from a hero with a partial plan (moved but didn't cast) now discards the partial so they snap back to their tile, so there's no way to leave the field in a weird in-between state.
Commit feedback got louder. The sparkle trail is now a burst of seven stars with staggered delay, varied size, and a range of yellow hues, so locking in a plan actually reads. Skip Move hides after any recorded move, the Leave button hides during the tutorial fight, and on cast completion the hero deselects and the spell highlight clears so you're not staring at lingering red tiles. The fight playout itself now advances on tap-anywhere, and the dialogue loading flicker is gone.
On the onboarding side, the guided intro now ends at Olija's first-mission briefing (dialogue 1) rather than waiting on Grey joining the party — the briefing is the actual end of the intro, and Grey can join before or after. While the guided intro is active, the top bar and bottom menu are fully hidden instead of just pointer-disabled, so a guided player can't poke at menus that aren't supposed to exist yet.
Friend triggers in walking scenes now wear a comic-style ! bubble when they're highlighted, replacing the easily-missed sparkle as the "talk to this NPC" cue. Library Aspects split into one trigger per hero (so you can walk up to the panel for a specific character), and the arena exit unlocks at dialogue 1 so you can see where you're going the moment the first-mission briefing ends.
Fresh-run hygiene: Play, Skip Tutorial, and Full Access on the title screen all now clear session state and map-visited persistence, so a new playthrough doesn't inherit stale flags from the last run. Without that fix the new guided-intro gate was surfacing leftover state from prior sessions.