More Meetings: Arcade Mode Badges

Another thing we've been playing around with is ideas for how to make each run a bit more unique compared to your previous runs, challenging you to change your play style or at least experience things more differently. We feel that right now each run is very similar to the last one, and a player is rarely encouraged to try new skills. Last week we talked about a feature we wanted to add to help out with that (Badges) and this week we have tried out some of those as well.

As a reminder, a Badge is something that will affect your run in some way, giving you certain bonuses while sometimes coming with a negative on the side (though mostly you will just get something nice). For now, we've divided the badges into seven categories depending on what they affect, such as: Arrows, Skills, Basic Attacks, Room changes, Passives, Potions and Shield.

Some examples we've been testing this week include:

* Casting a spell fires an arrow.
* Hitting an enemy with an arrow casts a meteor
* Three arrows drop after each regular battle room
* The first spell in each room is a guaranteed crit
* Every 5th spell deal triple damage
* A fae follows the player and casts a fire ball every few seconds
* Each basic attack increases the damage of your next skill
* One enemy in each room receives an automatic death mark when you enter the room
* Perfect Guarding an enemy causes them to be death marked

So far, we've quite pleased with how these serve to make each run a bit more different compared to the last, especially ones that encourage you to use other skills or abilities than what you'd normally use. We also have a ton of ideas for more Badges we want to test and play around with; the current pool isn't too big so repeats tend to happen quite often during our test runs. We also feel the lack of a proper interface; right now there's simply a message in the chat letting you know what badge you've gotten and what it does.

In order to properly test this and how it feels, we'll therefore start working on a basic interface for distributing your Badges, as well as some basic proper graphics for them to see how it all feels with some more visual cues.

Right now you will receive a badge for defeating a boss, but we've also played around with awarding them in chests or for challenges. The exact amount and what you'll receive badges for are yet to be decided, but for now we feel like it feels the most rewarding to get it post boss fight. As of now, you'll be able to have four badges, and if you receive any more past that you will need to replace one of the ones you currently have.

Part of our daily tasks right now is coming up with more badges to add, so there will be enough that each run feels new and fresh. Do you have any badges you'd like to see? Let us know and we might end up adding it :)