Monday Meeting: More Arcade Mode Discussions

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!