Can you be more specific on that one ?
I honestly don't think I increased the depth of the UI
I think I wasn't clear, and on review, some of my impression was warped, as we'll see below:
Generally speaking, I forgot how much of the navigating between sub-areas and area hubs was present in the older builds.
As a perfect illustration of this, you significantly streamlined navigation between v18.06.13 and v18.12.1 by treating each area as generally accessible within its area and only needing to go to the hub to leave the area, which was a wonderful idea and implementation. v18.12.1 is probably around where I started playing the game the most, because I had completely forgotten various aspects of v18.06.13, so for the rest of the discussion, I'll start with it and move forward from there. For the record, I'm arbitrarily selecting builds for comparison entirely based on what I find fastest which shows what I want to mention.
In v18.12.1 the menu is entirely text based and you can navigate around very quickly with minimal movement of the mouse using the left menu. This menu is the easiest to get around, but obviously has the least attention to aesthetics — for the majority of navigation menus, that doesn't matter to me, but I admit that the inventory and stores could have some issues in readability due to the wall of text.
By v19.2.2f you had moved to the square pictures for for the locations, circle buttons for area activities, although the straight text menu remained for talking with girls. When this happened, I felt the game slow down a lot for me. Navigating around the various regions got much slower due to needing to move the mouse around so much (especially on a laptop), and again, this is only relevant when you need to do grinding sections (such as playing through multiple weeks for getting stats for the next job promotion, for reaching the weekend or a specific day, for leveling the band, or for season change (this was the worst offender, and certain changes you've made since then have helped a lot).
v20.1.2 moves girl interactions to the vertical circle buttons just like the area activities. I should mention here for this version and v19.2.2f that I actually really like the appearance of these bottles. They do a great job of showing what's going on. My only complaint is that the time to move around and select everything is just getting slightly slower each release due to the smaller buttons spread over a larger area.
v20.2.2a moves all interactions to the circle buttons, but now on horizontal. I like the girl icons on area tiles, and I
love the story guide and inventory changes. The problem is the same as before, that things are now all small buttons over a large area. "Problem" here again isn't an accurate description in the abstract — the entire game is getting prettier and more polished with every release. The only problem is that the navigation requires incrementally more attention and time each release, and when needing to go through numerous full day cycles, it adds up to impact player experience.
I want to repeat where this is coming from: I'm not a developer, and I don't have any real solutions — you're making a great game and I can explain to myself where all your decisions came from and they all make sense. I just wanted to raise a constructive comment of one issue that I feel causes friction and sometimes lessens how long I continue playing. As mentioned before, I also definitely misremembered some of the trajectory of the game's development and you were correct in your confusion regarding my comment about clicks (given that I was totally off base with a mistaken memory there).
