Time Travel Temple Planning

Now that we're almost done with Mount Bloom, we felt it was high time to get some planning done for the temple we'll be working on next.

As you probably know, I already started working on the first area a while back. That place will serve as an introduction of the time jumping mechanic, so it's pretty straight forward and we could easily find the time for such a basic area way back while working on other things.

Now, in the end, we plan to have 3 different areas (each containing a set of houses, challenges and such), so last week we had a meeting where we decided on the major obstacles in the second and third zone!

Teddy and Fred taking notes and discussing the temple
while I play photographer!

While the first zone is a basic area with some introductory houses and barracks, the second zone will be an actual village. As you know, this will not be a regular temple, but a series of challenges taking place in the past and present version of a (currently abandoned) town. The third zone, meanwhile, will be a shrine you'll pass through on your way to your goal: the hidden artifact!

In the second zone, you'll face a series of challenges where you have to use time jumping to change things in the past in order to advance forward or solve quests. Since this is a village filled with people, many of the quests will involve helping the inhabitants of this place. However, we're also trying to keep the cutscenes down as much as we can, in order for it to still feel kind of temple like. I guess this balance will be one of our top struggles in creating this temple - we'll need a lot of dialogue to bring the quests (and story!) forward, but we don't want to overwhelm our players who up until now are used to a game that is somewhat light on text.

Coming up with cool puzzles will also be interesting! Since it's time jumping, you can only really change things in the past that affects the future and not the other way around. We have a bunch of ideas lined up for the next zones after our meeting, but if you have any suggestions, feel free to comment :D

In the meanwhile, here's a few of the things you'll most likely happen upon in the second Zone:

* The Inn (with an ancient wine cellar, oh my)
* Ancient Collector's HQ!
* A Strange Lab~
* The Trick Phasing Community showing off their stuff!
* Buried Treasure...........
* Some pretty important background story!

Excited?! Well, we are for sure! It's gonna be super fun to finally start working on this. And with that.... should probably go finish up stuff in the silly Mount Bloom.. :)