Our goal was to discuss more in detail exactly what's going to happen as you journey through the desert towards the harbour town, and what side quests we aim to include as we add this to the game.
We took a ton of notes on each of the maps, filling them with sentences about what will happen, what things will look like, what caves will connect and what will be in them, etc. After we were done, the desert had gone from a pretty basic set of maps to one of the most well thought out areas so far, at least in my opinion!
We aim to include three bigger side quests when we add it to frontline/stable (not including quests we might come put with for the harbour town), but like most areas, we have more ideas for other quests to include at a later date when it's time for an overall polish of the entire game. While it won't have a big side area like the Tai Ming's phase shift section, the main quest here will bring back a lot of old friends to the plot, and have you travel outside the desert as well.
With all this new information, there's a ton of new maps (cave interiors, specifically) for me to do, and a few new enemy and mini-boss animations for Fred to deal with as well! It's all gonna be a lot of fun, and we hope you'll be as excited to finally explore this area as we are making it.
However, before we start focusing for real on the desert, there's still something left to do: the Arcadia rework, including the Tai Ming and Mount Bloom floors which currently aren't in the game. So while we've made sure to plan ahead for this, it'll be a little while before we actually continue working on the desert stuff.
Every day we draw ever closer to actually finishing that stuff though, and once it's on frontline it will entail a whooole lot of testing for you guys. It's basically a completely new system, with lots of new buildings and the two new floors (if you can reach them)! Exciting times ahead :)
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Mini-bosses... Mini-dungeons? That's what I miss in Grindea, we got a really polished Santa's workshop mini-dungeon (In my opinion, the best early part of the game) and I hope that more will be included in the final game. Why not make more mini-dungeons that tie in with the story? (besides the fact that it takes effort and time)
ReplyDeleteAs you said, mini dungeons take a lot of time to create and we've been working on this game for a long time already, haha! But another reason why this doesn't involve more of an actual dungeon (there's a super small dungeon bit to it, but it's much smaller than the toy factory) is that we wanted to involve the actual area (the desert and harbor town) more, instead of keeping so much of the thing locked away in a dungeon!
DeleteHave you thought about adding prefixes to weapons that give certain bonuses to atk speed, damage, defence etc? That way it doesn't feel like you're forced to get the next weapon, in which there is an obvious scale. For example, Terraria does this, where sometimes when you craft an item it gets prefixes like 'Demonic' which adds 15% damage, knockback and 5% crit chance. You could also add the option of being able to reforge items for a sum of money at the blacksmith, for a chance at getting one of these prefixes. I think it would add more depth to the blacksmith, and of course loot in game. Obviously it would have to be tested, and there's the whole time problem again...
DeleteI was thinking, do you ever consider to include something on the side quests that helps the main progress? For example, a boss in the main story that is hard, but possible to kill without side quests, and a item that you obtain doing a side quest that help a lot to kill that boss, something like a equipament that give you resistance against it
ReplyDeleteThat's a very nice idea! We don't have anything like that planned for this particular area (yet), but we have a few similar ideas that will be added to earlier in the game. For now, simply getting the experience, gold and skill points from doing side quests help in their own way with the main quests, but it would definitely be cool to make more focused rewards to help with the story :)
DeleteI think what could help here is that instead of it being based on numbers, you could do a sidequest that means you a boss is weakened when you fight him. Similar to how in Breath of the Wild, you can do the shrines (Zelda:BOTW's dungeons) to fight parts of the final boss to weaken him, so that in the final fight he has less phases. Another thing possible, is, I'm not sure how complicated it is to add this to a game, but allowing passive routes through quests, maybe you could do a side questline that allows you to not fight a boss or something. Of course, what could work with this if you do not wish to influence the main storyline in this way, is that you make sidequests have multiple ways of doing them, e.g passive and aggressive ways to handle a quest. This way everybody's experiences of the game would be more interesting, and more engaging.
DeleteOBVIOUSLY I ADVISE FINISHING THE GAME BEFOREHAND!
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