I have always thought of The Eyes of Ara as a game of two parts. The first part being the main story line and critical path of puzzles, and the second being the hunt for all of the bonus pickups.

My design philosophy for the first part was that solving the puzzles should be the challenge, not finding them, and so all of the rooms in the game are designed to draw the player’s attention to the most important elements. Conversely, the bonus pickups are designed to be hidden (indeed I often used tricks with the art and room designs to misdirect attention away from hidden pickups). I’m a big fan of hidden collectables, but understanding that not everyone shares the desire to seek out that elusive 100% completion score I made these completely optional.

It has been great to see that a lot more people have been determined to find all of the pickups than I anticipated. However some of the pickups can be particularly hard to locate, and on dark or high-contrast screens a few have proved to be very difficult to see. Given that everyone has a different level of patience for how long they are willing to search for hidden pickups, these two things combined means that (understandably) some players become frustrated with the pickup hunt.

Patch 1.1.00 aims to rectify this with new Hint Settings added to the Gameplay Settings menu. From top to bottom they are designed to give progressively stronger hints for finding hidden pickups.

• Adaptive Hotspot Cursor: Causes the mouse cursor to change to a magnifying lens when mousing over a hotspot. This option has been available since launch and has simply been renamed in this patch. On by default.
• Hidden Pickup Chime: Play a sound when entering a room with hidden pickups still to find. Off by default.
• Pickup Highlight: Causes pickups to have a gold shine effect pass over them, making them easier to spot. Includes individual settings for Inventory items and Hidden Pickups (coins, figurines, and photos only). Off by default.

In addition, many puzzles and pickups have been re-lit to accommodate dark and/or high-contrast screens. There’s a few other changes in this update as well, read the full patch notes below.

1.1.00 Patch Notes

General

• Greatly optimised the file size of many assets. This has reduced load times significantly, as well as reducing the download and install size.

Puzzles

• Re-lit many hidden pickups throughout the game that were difficult to see on dark/high-contrast screens or in bad lighting conditions.

UI

• Added Hint options to Gameplay Settings
• Added a Gamma Slider in the Graphics Settings.
• The Up and Down arrows on the keyboard can now be used to zoom in on notes and journals. This change should help players without a scroll wheel, such as those using trackballs or touch pads.

Localisation (Because I know you will ask :P )
This patch also includes a lot of back-end code to support localisation into other languages. All of this is invisible to the user, but it means that the game is now ready for language options to be switched on once the text files themselves have been translated.