
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/in ... ts/1699659
Our revamp for conversation text scrolling now has text appear at the top of the interface rather than appearing near the bottom, so you don't find yourself scrolling nearly as much. When we need to show lots of text all at once, we also added a "Show More" button and a little down arrow indicating that there is more below. Instead of manually scrolling when there's lots of words on screen, now you can just keep hitting the Enter key, Spacebar, or clicking the button, which means that you can focus more on the contents of the conversation rather than getting pulled out of the narrative.
That said, a text box isn't in and of itself the most interesting thing, and for Torment we wanted to do something a bit more special. So, we decided to include additional notifications, audio cues and special effects while you're in conversations in order to highlight key moments.
A great example of this is the new "Item Gained" prompt. All of our items in the game are hand-designed and often written with lots of detailed lore and story elements, and so we wanted it to make it feel like a great moment when you found something interesting. Since so many of these items are given out during conversations or scripted interactions, it made sense to devote a portion of the conversation interface to them.
Whenever you find or receive an item while the conversation screen is open, the game will now highlight the occasion by showing you a special panel on the right side of the window. This has a purpose, too – you can also mouse over the item to view its info in a tooltip, and right-click to bring up its full detailed description just like you would see in the inventory screen. This means when an NPC gives you a cool new piece of numenera, you don't have to wait another five minutes to look at it. It was one of those little things we never realized we wanted in an RPG until we went to implement it.
We've also made improvements to the fanfare when you get other rewards or status changes. Now, we have animated visual effects that play in key instances – most notably, when your Tidal Affinity changes (it is Tides of Numenera after all), but also for other things like XP gains.