The dungeon gets the whole screen

The battle screen in part 3 had a problem you could see on a phone: the dungeon was squeezed between panels. On the evening of November 2 two decisions settled it. Combat would run on speed rather than rounds, and dedicating space to the barmaid was wasting the dungeon view.

The battle was rebuilt overnight. Faster fighters act more often, and a strip of portraits along the top shows who is next. The fight pauses on the barmaid's turn and waits for her, and her recipes cook on battle time. The room fills the screen, and everything else is an overlay: health and battle bars in a corner, the super gauge under them, and the cart's actions only on her turn. Health now carries between fights on a floor.

The next morning I asked whether the camera could show everyone's faces. We chose a side-on stage in the spirit of Octopath Traveler. Each fight room finds its longest clear line between the two sides and looks across it from wherever the walls cut away best. The party faces right, the foes face left, and nobody turns their back, even mid-lunge. A planner sweep of 86 fight rooms and over a thousand simulated formations checked it.

Her corner got the same treatment. Looking at it, I said it was begging for a radial menu. Now her round portrait opens a ring of eight slices on her turn: four recipes and four supers, numbered like keys. A cooking dish's rim fills like a clock and turns gold when it's ready to serve, and between turns the ring folds down to a slim band of pips. The ring and the camera were built in parallel sessions and merged together.