Vilya's Workblog

And for the last post before the Christmas break (we will be back on Jan 1st!), there's a bunch of NPCs made by Fred! Some of these have portraits that have been showed before, but the two on the right are brand new archaeologists that will be inspecting the old ruins and skeletons found in the desert!

Hope you guys have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!! See you again on January 1st~

The next interface up on the design table belongs to the Bank and involves trading essence for gold, and gold for essence! For this interface we'll use the Quantum Lumber interface from Housing as a base:

The main difference between the Lumber interface and the Bank's interface is that instead of Lumber we'll deal with Essence (obviously), and that you'll be able to either buy Essence by handing in gold, or sell Essence and get gold back for it.

From the beginning we thought we'd deal with both in the same interface (calling it exchange instead), where you'd scroll right to get more Essence and less gold, and scroll left to get more Gold but less Essence (with a symbol for the respective currency on either side). However, we felt it's probably easier to understand if we just call it Buy/Sell Essence and keep them separated.

Here's our first try at a modified version of the Lumber interface:

Here, the Lumbers have each been replaced by an Essence statue. The top box will contain a number indicating how many Essence you want to buy (or sell), the number next to the big coin will let you know how much that will cost you (or how much you'll get back for selling your precious Essence), and the number next to the Essence-with-a-coin indicates the current exchange rate (which don't change the way things are designed now, but we thought it might be interesting to know).

The small gold coin is next to your current gold total, and the Essence-with-a-bag shows how many Essence you currently own. Pretty much like it is in the Lumber interface, in other words!

To make it more clear whether you're in buy or sell mode, we made two variations of the above interface, one with a plus next to the top Essence icon (indicating this is the buy interface), and one with a minus (indicating this is the sell interface). There's also a corresponding plus and minus next to the coin, to show whether you'll gain or lose gold on the affair:

Finally, the shop menu (where you select Buy/Sell or Talk) needed two new buttons for this, so here they are as well:

One more interface down, and probably the last I'll do before Christmas holidays! We'll take Christmas week off and start work again the first day of the new year. To be honest I'm already looking forward to getting back to work, as we absolutely love our new office and spending time there has so far been great for productivity and honestly overall life quality! Tomorrow it's Fred's Friday though, the last post before the holiday break. Stay tuned!

Remember Trunk, the sidekick who will fill the role of (a more cheerful and optimistic) Bag in Arcade Mode? In order to communicate with you properly, he of course needs to have his own portrait:

And here's the final version, slightly cut off to fit the text box:

More interface design, this time featuring the Arena! As a reminder, here's what it looks like in Story Mode:

There are two categories, Challenges and VS. Challenges won't be available in Arcade Mode, but there will be something else:

Boss practice! For those of you who have troubles with bosses, we know it's really difficult and annoying to get chances of practicing against them as you have to survive a whole lot of regular enemies first. To give players a chance to polish their skill against these more difficult bad guys (as well as a way of learning their patterns), the Arcadia Arena will let you pick and choose among the bosses you've reached so far (no skipping ahead). When designing this interface, I presented two options: one featuring three bosses per page (with a scrollbar), and their name next to them:

..and another, featuring just the boss images, with their title and description shown only in the text box instead:

It's likely we'll go for this second version as it has room for a lot more enemies and the text box won't be used much anyway!

Once you've selected the boss you want to practice against, you'll be presented with three character slows, featuring the last three characters who reached that specific boss, with their equipped weapon and main skill of choice shown beneath them:

This is so that you'll have approximately the right level and equipment for the boss fight (as your current Arcadia character is level 0 with no gear what so ever)! It gives an accurate representation of the fight, as it reflects how you got there last time, and allows you to try out the fight with possibly different builds (if you change playstyle between runs).

Once you've selected which of your old characters you want to rebattle the boss as, you'll be transported directly to the boss room for another go at the battle! Currently, none of these will cost gold or any other value, so you can practice as much as you like :)

As we continue working on and implementing Arcadia rework, it's only natural that our weekly meeting has a lot to do with establishing the smaller details of how everything will work! This week we've decided on a bunch of stuff:

Early Gold Quests

In order to quickly get your first building(s) up and running, we'll add a couple early quests with gold rewards to speed things up and get your into the whole building thing as soon as possible! Some will probably be reused from old Arcadia, while a couple will be brand new.

Balancing Gold Rewards for Slow Builds

How much gold you get per run/room will be balanced is a tough one, because we don't solely want it to depend on how quickly you clear rooms (even if they will play into it too, of course). Using only speed as an indicator would mean that certain builds, such as anything involving Insect Swarm for instance, would get a lot less gold vs the builds with faster clear times. To counter this, we'll award extra gold depending on how long your active time on a run is, meaning if you play for a long while with a slower build, you'll still get the proper gold reward that quicker builds get.

Build Time for Unlocked Buildings

Remember how I mentioned a build time that would count either IRL time or Arcade run time (or a mix of the two where time passes faster if you play Arcade Mode)? After some discussions, our current stance is that we'll probably skip build times altogether.

This was a kind of difficult decision because we wanted to give players another incentive to play more Arcade Mode (play the game to unlock your building/unlock it faster)! However, you've already played Arcade Mode to gain the gold used to unlock the building, so it felt a little unfair that now you have to play the game more before it actually spawns, even though you already paid for it. Instead, we'll probably use a fade to black effect with some building sounds before you return in front of your fully build property.

We're still not 100% sure about this, and each of us actually have our own preferred version with the fade to black being the compromise. What would you guys prefer? Would build time be a nice or annoying thing?

A couple of Treats & Curses

We've only just begun planning for these, but here are the ones we've come up with so far:

Curse - Increased Elite spawn rate

Curse - No/Reduced healing (or both as two separate curses)

Treat - No Elites spawn at all

Treat - More HP from HP orbs

Treat - You start your run with a Time Crystal that rewinds time to when you first entered the floor if you should die. Meaning you get a chance to play through the floor again and fix your mistakes!

Treat - Increased chance of getting treasure rooms

Keep sharing your best ideas and we'll see where we end up with all of these!

Time for Fred's Friday, featuring a return to the desert and more of its inhabitants! Here's a whole bunch of the iterations for four of the characters you'll meet in the harbor town, with the final versions inside each green circle:

...And an animation for that poor winter fae, who has been lured into the desert by his friend! Poor thing is suffering from the less than ideal weather for a winter loving creature!

Next up, we'll continue the interface business by taking a look at the interface of one of the more important new features: Treats and Curses!

For this interface the important part is having enough room for a bunch of treats/curses, with a text box featuring a description of each treat/curse, a title bar (so you know which interface you're in), as well as some way of letting the player know when treats/curses don't work together - for example if you have on treat that disables all elite enemies along with a curse that makes them more likely to spawn.

In the above sketch I used the potion interface as a base. There will be a few key differences though: for one, it won't cost you money to change curses/treats, at least not the way it's currently designed. If you're currently hovering over a curse/treat that won't work with the ones you have selected currently, a speech bubble popup will appear with a stop sign, showing you which ones are incompatible. Next to the curse/treat title in the text box will be how much score will be added or subtracted to your score, in percent.

Once you select a curse, a new interface will pop up where you can select which slot you want to add the curse/treat to:

In this interface there will also be a total score counter showing how much your total score will be with your selected curses/treats. In the sketch above there's another stop sign next to the incompatible curse/treat, however this will likely not be added to the game: instead, if you try to select a curse or treat when you have others selected that wouldn't work with it, there will be a prompt asking if you'd like to remove the ones that are incompatible with the one you're trying to select. If you answer yes, the above interface will pop up with the incompatible curses/treats removed: if you answer no, you'll remain in the curse/treat selection screen.

Now, time to freshen up the graphics a bit:

Here I've added some proper graphics to nearly everything: Muffin's Treats has a title sprite, the pop-up speech bubble indicating which curses/treats are incompatible has been added, and the background is properly made as well. The text I haven't touched though, as it will be added properly with the game engine.

Next, same thing but with Candy's title sprite:

And finally, the screen where you select which slot to add your selected curse/treat to! Again, the stop sign will probably not be used the way we ended up designing things, but we hadn't finalized that by the time I finished making the graphics:

Time to get those new interfaces going! First up, the main interface as you run around Arcadia. Here's the old version of the interface:

And here's a basic suggestion with a new gold indicator and slots for Treats/Curses:

Now, the treats and curses will affect your score multiplier by a certain percentage each: either they'll increase your score or they'll reduce your score. More score equals more rewards (and a higher place on the high score list!), so we felt it was important to include this in the interface somehow. Here's a quick sketch featuring the score multiplier increase both next to the score and next to the treats/curses:

While we liked the idea of having the percentage show next to the score counter (that way it can show all through your run as well), we weren't sold on having an exact copy of it next to the treats/curses. Instead, we thought maybe we should separate them and show how much each of your curses or treats actually subtract or add to your score:

As of now, we still haven't decided whether we want to include the above version or just keep the cleaned up score multiplier next to your score (as seen below). Do you think you'd prefer to see how much each score adds/subtracts, or is that unnecessary information that only clutters up the interface?

Since this day is likely filled with meetings where we need to finalize the things mentioned yesterday, have a WIP gif of yet another sailor moving into the harbor town!

Finished portrait, with and without hat:

Alright, back to business! As mentioned before, we're at the point where we need to design a lot of interface stuff and decide how things will work together and unlock in terms of the new Arcadia rework features.

These include new interface indicator for gold, treats and curses when you're running around inside Arcadia itself. Here we decided to combine Treats and Curses. Previously we said you could pick either Treats or Curses, and have three of each, but since then we have changed our minds: now, you'll be able to pick and choose between Treats and Curses, but you can only pick 3 in total. It's good to keep in mind that 3 isn't a 100% fixed number at this point, we'll have to try things out and see what feels good. The final number could be anywhere between 2-5 (is my guess, anyway).

We haven't actually decided on which specific Treats or Curses to include yet, so if you have any cool ideas, feel free to share them with us! As a reminder, Treats are features that will make an Arcade run easier, but lowers your score, while Curses make your runs harder and increases your score!

Selecting Treats/Curses at their respective NPC will need a menu of its own too, as will the Cinema's replay feature (where you'll be able to view past runs), the Bank exchange service (where you can convert Essence to Gold and the other way around), and Master Ji's challenge selection (where you pick which of his shield-focused challenges you want to try). We also need to come up with the challenges the latter will have.

The Arena will mainly use the interface from Story Mode, but we will also need a menu where you can select your last three characters that reached any boss in the game and have a go at the boss again. Here, we've decided to keep the Multiplayer mini-games, while the single player ones will be replaced by the boss-rebattle feature. Our reasoning here is that it might be fun to be able to challenge your friends to mini-games in the Arena without having to start Story Mode (since we have the arena anyway, you know), while the single player portion of the Arena doesn't make as much sense to keep and works better in Story Mode alone.

There's also another matter we need to discuss, and finalize: whether the build time of unlocked buildings will count IRL time, the time you play Arcade runs, or both. Last time we talked about this we could not decide, so now's possibly your last chance: what would you prefer? To wait a short while regardless of what you do, to have to play arcade runs for the buildings to finish, or to be able to shorten the waiting time by playing arcade mode?

Let us know what you think!

It's the first Fred's Friday written in our new office (!!!) (...more about the move later)! And it's time to introduce a new character of quite some importance: the Trunk!

This little guys will be the equivalent of Bag, but for Arcade Mode. We didn't have a character like this in Arcade Mode previously, but the more we thought about it, the more we felt it was lacking somehow. It kind of felt strange to have bag say random things when he isn't even a character in this part of the game, and as we start to get to the point where we need to design how to unlock the new features, we felt a sidekick that can help you understand how to do that felt more interesting than random info boxes.

Aside from being your sidekick in the Arcade Mode portion of the game, bag and trunk have very little in common, though! This little fellow is cheerful and happy, excited to be a part of your adventures. (Well, maybe Bag is too, but he doesn't show it half as well as this one!)

Stay tuned for more information about this new character and how you'll interact in Arcade Mode!

We're in our new office!! Yesterday we finally made the move, but we had already started preparing the day before. Here's the old office in our apartment's guest room, as it used to be, and fully packed:

The saddest thing we'll be leaving behind is the cats! It's been so nice to be able to spend all day long with our lovely two cats, who will have to wait alone at home for us to return from the office every day now ;_;

Yesterday, the moving company knocked on our door at 8 am, ready to move our stuff. The whole thing took about an hour, plus another 30 minutes of putting everything together at the new office, here pictured empty:

After we were done, we went to have lunch and went by a couple stores to buy a few things to make our office more cozy: a few plants (fake, so they won't die if we have to leave the office for a few days), a clothes hanger where we can put our coats, and a few decorations for the window (including a cute little christmas tree):

The whole place feels very cozy now, and we're very happy with the space. At first we thought it might be a little on the small side, but we're really satisfied with the amount of room we have and how comfy we could make it.

The only sad part, as mentioned, is leaving behind the cats - but the walks and ability to separate work and free time should be worth it! Already work feels much more focused and distraction-free, so that's great :)

And now, the final part of the Arcadia rework: the Dojo interior! This is another building that exists in Story Mode, and may have its old version replaced by this new Arcade version. It's designed to have a big enough fighting area for you to prove yourself in a set of challenges, as well as a shield block training session we may include in the earlier parts of story mode: we'll see!

Without further ado, the WIP video:

And the finished version! I thought it'd be cool to save some space at the bottom where Master Ji's apprenticed can stand and watch/cheer for you as you do your challenges! In the section above, the master himself will spectate your progress:

The second to last interior before all the interior designs of the new and improved Arcadia are completed, belongs to the Aquarium! This place will feature a set of fishes that you captured during your run, as well as the typical souvenirs:

In the sketch, I included a set of fish shaped balloons, but I think we'll let Fred make those from start to finish since they will need to be animated to really have that proper balloon feel! For now, here's what the Aquarium looks like, sans the proper fishes and mentioned balloons:

This week, let's jump straight into continuing the interior spree of the Arcadia Rework! It's time to take a look at the Cinema, another of those brand new buildings that don't exist in Story Mode. Here, you'll be able to watch replays of your previous Arcade runs, and even share them with your friends.

While most of this will take place in one of the ticket booths near the entrance, we couldn't resist adding a bit of a cinema feel with a big screen and some seats for flavour. Perhaps some NPCs will be here, watching a short movie on screen? Maybe some of them will even offer a quest of two!

Time to move on from fishes and do some desert work instead! Fred has been making a ton of NPCs lately, and here are some of the ones you'll meet during your adventure:

Can you figure out which NPC belongs to which portrait (hit the portrait label on the right bar to check all the portraits out)?

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