First of all sorry for no update this Friday! I've actually been sick for about a week and ran out of scheduled posts - oops. I'm getting better now though, so I'm slowly getting back to work.
Before I got sick though, we had another Monday, and another meeting! Well, we don't do these meetings every week, although we probably should have them more often than we currently do since they're so great at making sure we're staying on track.
This meeting we talked about a lot of stuff, but the main focus was ironing out some final (?) remaining questionmarks about the third Tai Ming zone.
First up: The Entrance Map.
While you have not yet been able to enter it, some of you might have seen it in my previous blog posts. When testing the entire dungeon in one go, we realized that when zoning between the second and third Tai Ming maps, the distances felt kind of awkward since there wouldn't have been enough space on the left to account for the graveyard.
Some might feel this is a trivial matter, and that you can just use your imagination to imagine you passed through an underground corridor and appeared in a completely new place (we haven't exactly made sure everything fits together perfectly in other places), but we felt like this map might improve if we added some kind of holy corridor as buildup to the shrine, so that's basically what we'll do.
What year is it?
Some of you might have asked this question already, with all the time jumps in the dungeon! We've had multiple discussions about whether or not to include years, either when you zone or/and added somewhere in your journal.
The obvious argument for is that it would hopefully make it easier to know how much time has passed between certain events. However, there's also the risk of annoying people who forgot what the previous year was, and now gets another year presented. This happens to me a lot in movies: in the beginning they show the setting and present us with which year it is, and I go "oh okay so we're in the 1600's", and promply forget what the last two numbers where. Then, a while later, there's a jump and they show another year, also 1600's, but since I didn't remember the whole year I have no idea how many years have passed in either direction (is it a flashback?), until I get it based on the context. In those cases the years did nothing but annoy me, since I had to rely on the context to grasp how much time has passed anyway.
It is our hope that we'll provide the player with enough such context that there won't be a need to know the exact year. We haven't completely thrown out the idea though - if it becomes too confusing, we might add them after all.
The Desert
After Tai Ming comes the desert, and as such we had another talked and decided that before we update the Stable beta, we'll add the bare minimum of the first desert map - most likely only the background and something blocking your way from continuing (so no enemies or NPCs or anything like that).
The reason? Those "this area is not in the game yet" notifications. Once we add the first desert map we actually won't have any of those anymore, and I'm pretty sure you guys are just as annoyed by them as we are! Nothing throws you out of a game as much as a blatant reminder that you're only playing the beta.
Temple of Seasons Story?
And now for something completely different. Did you know that we, from the beginning, intended to have picture carvings here and there in the Temple of Seasons, telling the story about the player character's mother Charlotte and how she came to save the fae that one time? Don't worry, we won't add that right now, but we did have enough time during this meeting to reiterate that we will add it at some point. Likely after the main story is done.
Spirit World Objects
Finally, we talked a bit about the spirit world and what kind of objects should appear when using the skill. We want certain things to be able to appear in order to create puzzles and challenges - such as a bridge that only exists in the spirit world, and so on. During this discussion we talked about what they should look like graphic wise.
Right now we're thinking that we should go full on horror style - having the objects be made of bones or dark goo or other creepy things you'd associate with ghosts. We're still balancing on an edge where we're not sure if it's gonna be too creepy or not (the game hasn't been that scary until that point, even if we begin to see some darker things in Tai Ming), but hopefully it'll not feel too off in the end.
If you guys have any suggestions for what you'd like to see graphic wise in the spirit world, let us know in the comments! :)
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