Underspire's minimap is unreadable (and how to FIX it)

This has been reported/complained about previously (and more than once) but when viewing the Underspire Minimap it is occasionally difficult to determine whether a given room is a dead-end or whether it continues down a path.

After a bit of close observation and some light analysis, there is a pattern to this!

  • When viewing the minimap, the “card icon” used to indicate an uncleared room is … actually scaled to the same full size as the room it appears on. And because the asset is more or less flush with the tile’s top and right edges, this obscures whether or not that room has a passage proceeding north or east.

This is also resolution-dependent: on Switch (1280x720p) it’s literally impossible to read (on the minimap) whether an uncleared room has a north exit, and almost impossible to likewise read whether it has an east exit. On PC resolutions (1020p or higher) it is less of an issue, but make no mistake it is still an issue!

Exhibit A: annotated PC screenshot

gemsof-undespire-pixels

This should be (technically speaking) a super easy fix, and I’ll provide two ideas to start:

  • When viewing the Underspire minimap, shrink the card icon so that it displays noticeably smaller than the underlying room icon it’s placed on. This would ensure that all the room’s exits are always visible.
  • For every blank space that connects to a known (but uncleared) room, display a special icon over that space.

Personally I’d prefer the latter option, since it would be highly visible from the minimap and a good indication of “wait, I haven’t explored that yet?”.

Exhibit B: Mockups with annotations

Pixel measurements taken at a 720p resolution:

The actual problem – and how to fix it:

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