Plans for Mt:Bloom

Today we had another one of those planning days! We're heading closer and closer to actually getting into Mt: Bloom, so we had a talk about how to progress there.

As you might have noticed, we've added some kind of quest in each new area before you can progress to the temple. In Pumpkin Woods, it's the curse of the haunted forest and in Seasonne you have to explore the Toy Factory before you continue on. Mt:Bloom is no different, and so a lot of our discussions were focused on what kind of stuff we'd throw at the player in this mountain.

We ended up deciding on three different challenges, found in different parts of the map.

Challenge #1: Gauntlet With Debuffing Flowers
In this challenge you'll battle waves of enemies while managing a heap of flower buds which grow and (if you don't hit them) will create a debuff in the surrounding area once they burst into their full flower form. The debuffs we've considered so far are poison and blind, but we're also discussing other ways they might inconvenience the player, should they forget to manage the buds.

Challenge #2: Crystal Bug Madness
In this challenge your goal is to direct a bunch of spinning crystal bugs onto a huge boulder blocking your way. For every bug you direct onto the boulder, it breaks a bit more, causing more bugs to appear. There will also be a set of blinding mushrooms spawning across the map, and when you hit the boulder, rocks will fall from the sky. Basically, a lot of dodging while trying to hit en crystal bugs in the right direction!

Challenge #3: Poison Gas Room
This is a room filled with poisonous gas, which hurts you continuously! How in the world will you get through here alive? We kind of want to make it impossible to simply run though the room, instead we want the player to break things and/or battle enemies in order to get health orbs to sustain their journey through. Balancing this to make it challenging enough without it being too difficult for our more casual players will be interesting!

The order of these challenges might of course change, as might the challenges themselves - we haven't gotten around to prototyping them yet, after all.

We also got to talk a bit about side quests in the area, and we have a few exciting ones lined up! As usual, we're not entirely sure how many we'll add at this point - we plan one adding quite a bunch for each area once we've finished the game, but for now we want to keep our focus on the main story, so we'll probably settle for just a few!

Since it's a cave filled with crystals, mining will definitely be a theme. As will monsters defending their precious rocks from outsiders... :)

More on that later!