More Future Stuff!

This Tuesday was a bit of a different day! It started out normally, but pretty early in the day we had a meeting with a couple of people from the local newspaper, who did an interview about the company and what we're doing. Apparently someone (thanks, whoever you are) had told them that we do some cool stuff.

So that was pretty cool! Will be interesting to see how it turns out :)

After the interview we went back to do stuff for the festivals, but since I've been showing off a lot of that already, I thought I'd end this week by yet another post talking about future stuff! There were still a few points on our To-Talk-About-List that we hadn't covered yet, so last week we went to our beloved fast food place and had a talk!

First up, a pretty big one:

Boss Re-Battles in Arcade Mode
We'll be implementing an arena in Arcade Mode (which appears after you've unlocked a certain amount of Town upgrades) where you'll be able to train against bosses you've previously faced in your runs! This has been suggested on the forums, and we thought, why not?

Initially we considered adding a way of training whole floors, but we thought that would risk changing the meta from trying actual, complete runs to doing training rounds of each floor until you feel you've mastered them enough, and that doesn't seem as exciting as having to battle your way through all floors every time.

We've only talked a little bit about how this will work in terms of what level and gear you'll have as you battle the bosses, but we think we'll have you select between your latest three characters that reached the boss battle on a run. That way the level and gear will be authentic and you can try out the battle again with the exact same setup as the one you had when you won (or lost) the last time you got there. It also saves you the time it'd take to respec & equip your character every time you start a boss training battle.

We're also thinking of adding a small Essence fee to each boss unlock, in addition to actually having to reach it in an Arcade Mode run. This way Essence gets another use, making it more valuable!

An arena would be nice to practice difficult battles, such as the ones with 500 bees!

And then, some smaller things, also based on suggestions on the forums:

* A fishing pond that unlocks as a town upgrade where you can spend some time fishing while waiting for friends to connect. The fishes will probably disappear once you start an actual run, so they won't give you any additional money or points, they're simply for fun :)

* A pen emoticon that writes when you're typing in the chat. Like the book when you browse the menu, this serves to show your friends you're doing something instead of being afk.

* Finally, we're also looking into implementing a system where you unlock more and more information about enemies based on how many you've beaten! Once you're unlocked all info you'll get "[enemy] mastery", which will give you some sort of bonus - either some kind of item representing the enemy, or increasing the drop rate of said enemy's items, we haven't decided the specifics yet.

I believe a lot of these suggestions originally come from Own over at the forum, who is a great supplier of ideas! We really do take a lot of the stuff you tell us into consideration, so feel free to spam our forums with more systems or changes you'd like to see. We love to hear it! :)