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Thank you for the detailed description of your experience. The tutorials used to be one part, just like the stand alone one on the title screen, but people were suggesting dividing them into smaller sections, and I also split them with the story, so that feedback gives me mixed feelings.

I will look into removing rooms requiring mushrooms from the first 1 or 2 templates.

You are not always required to use mushrooms, like the room with a mushroom in the middle can be progressed through with using your jump abilities or dash instead. Same goes for the u-turn room. Bouncing on mushrooms is pretty much required when you play with no mana, but other than that I give players freedom to move in different ways.

Another thing makes bouncing on mushrooms different is if you use sprinting, or not. I can see why those rooms can be too difficult to new players, and need to be removed from beginner rooms. On the other hand I don't want to just have only boring, flat rooms left (I want to show off the cool rooms as soon as possible, damn it), but I see introducing them later is going to be needed.

I will add more checks to only show the "are you sure?" messages when it makes sense.

Sprinting as default running speed is probably a good option to add, not sure abut making it default thou. I did add option to make shift as a toggle so players wouldn't need to hold it. I personally prefer holding it, and releasing for all the extra control.

Your menu looks much better than before. Keep going - simplify everything as much as you possibly can.

Any ideas on how I could make it less overwhelming? UI is always a struggle.

>UI

I'd say, in no particular order:

Reduce submenus and combine them into one as much as possible
If no reduction is possible, group things together and show that group on the menu (such as: "Dungeon Stuff" contains the start dungeon submenu, all the modifiers, etc)
Hide the things you have no access to (or heavily gray out the buttons)
Don't give player the ability to edit the UI until you're sure they're ready for it
Show don't tell: remove text boxes telling you how to use the UI and instead have the player learn from objectives (this is hard to do)
Example: Instead of clicking a submenu and having a textbox appear and say This is where you do X, have a popup while you're doing something somewhere else telling you "Hey go do this. It's in X menu, it does Y" and leave it at that.
Highlights around a button in a strong obvious color when the button wants to be clicked for progression reasons, or if it unlocked. Think of a blinking red button from the movies - you need to steer the player's movements when your UI is huge.

Your inspiration should be modern releases. They have soulless, but incredibly functional UIs. A player is NEVER getting lost in a modern release's UI, and it's not because they're not complicated. Just make sure to keep the soul!

Reduce submenus and combine them into one as much as possible

I added more submenus because that was the only solution I came up with for decreasing the amount of information displayed at the same time.

Hide the things you have no access to (or heavily gray out the buttons)
Don't give player the ability to edit the UI until you're sure they're ready for it
Yeah, I got some ideas for adding an option for hiding all the yet to be unlocked locations from the office.

Highlights around a button in a strong obvious color when the button wants to be clicked for progression reasons, or if it unlocked. Think of a blinking red button from the movies
I added blinking "!" on some buttons, but I guess that was not enough.

Your inspiration should be modern releases. They have soulless, but incredibly functional UIs.

Yep, my ui is basically homm3 ui if it had text instead of all the nice icons. I might need to add placeholder icons after all.

Thanks for all the tips.