New Arcadia suggestions!

[Own]

Based on the content I've played with.

Clint & Dye: Opens up a little patch of farm in Arcadia. You can find seeds rarely in the dungeon. These seeds can sprout as many different colors of bloomo, which can be harvested to make dye from their petals. Dye can be used to change the colors of (certain!) pets around town by talking to them and applying it. Possibly you can get dye that even changes your own skin color to any color of the rainbow?

Apartments: Four homes (starting with 1) you can fill with an assortment of NPCs you may find in the dungeon! If you rescue them from their cage, you have the option to allow that NPC to move into one of these homes. Essentially NPCs that have no other apparent purpose to serve in Arcadia. Could have a pool of 10~ different ones, allowing you to fill up your apartments as you like? Each NPC you have in an apartment decorates it to their own style, and adds a bonus percentage to your gained gold at the each of each run in tax. You can also kick NPCs out, returning them to the dungeon pool, if you find a new resident you like better!

Loods:

Angel Lood - Very rare. Only runs when you deal any damage to it. If it's the last enemy on screen, it adds an extra room to your current floor - a shop, a ? room, a challenge room, something? Or just adds a buff to you that persists until the end of the floor, or next floor. Maybe just spawns a nurse.

Devil Lood - Very rare. Triggers a curse/debuff in the room you're in if you beat it before it flees. Spawns a room with an evil merchant within it on the map.

Toll Room: Rooms on the map that are sealed by a piggybank lock. Dump the requested (massive sum of) gold into it to unlock the room! It can house a bonus challenge, fishing area, or a room filled with elites for bonus EXP/chance of cards/loot! Or it could be a room filled with a bunch of Loods. Kill as many as you can before they flee!

New Challenges:

Reach floor # while visiting under # rooms. Skip everything you possibly can!

New Curses:

Off The Grid - No shops spawn. Make do only with what you find or earn!
One Hit-Point Wonder - Your max HP may rise, but your current HP never goes above 1! Synergizes well with certain skills and talents.
Batty - Every normal room contains a swarm of bats!

Carnival Tent:

Various attractions are here, paid in essence, with individual games costing more and more essence to play on each unique visit, resetting to normal after you leave. You earn points for various things. Once you leave the tent you lose all your points, so spend them before you go!

NPC 1: Can apply various temporary tattoos to your characters face (until changed? or as an unlocked useable item?), as a layer above the skin but below hats/masks. Want to have a half-blue face like Braveheart's William Wallace? Or a red streak over one eye like your favorite anime dude? Pay up!

Punching Bag: Similar to the fair in Evergrind! The bar gets smaller and smaller, then the icon gets faster and faster! The more times you successfully hit the icon, the more points you win. Pay essence to play.

Barrel o' Fish: Similar to the fair in Evergrind! Continues until you lose. The bar gets smaller and smaller, the fish faster and faster! The more fish you catch, the more points you win.

Bullseye: Similar to Robin's game, with 5 layers. You get 30 seconds and 10 arrows to get as high a score as you can! No combo bonus, so just aim for the farthest back ones you can get! The better your score, the more points you get.

Points: What to spend them on?

NPC: Can apply various temporary tattoos to your characters face (until changed? or as an unlocked useable item?), as a layer above the skin but below hats/masks. Want to have a half-blue face like Braveheart's William Wallace? Or a red streak over one eye like your favorite anime dude? Pay up!

Items: Tons of cute carnival face cutouts to add to your home! Decorations to add around town! Cosmetics, like a branch with a stick of cotton candy on the end!

Hall of Heroes

A building that fills out the more you play! Has a pedestal for a statue of every enemy and boss in the game. Shows how many times you have killed a certain type of enemy, how many times they've killed, how many times you've gotten their arcade, etc. Starts off with a stone pedestal and statue, but pedestal turns golden after a # of times you've gotten their card, the statue golden after a # of times you've killed elite versions of them, or killed them without taking damage for bosses! Also has statues for each of the attack/magic skills, showcasing how many enemies you've killed with each one. Kill a certain amount of enemies with them to give them golden pedestals.

Floor -1:

The land of misfit monsters or cursed individuals, under your town. For people/sprites like the Pumpkin Woods scarecrow, mushroom-head man, cavetroll-Remedi, etc. Trying to build a peaceful society in the darkness. Their quests are... unusual.

HP Drive: 'Donate' a total of # health over the course of a single run. At the start of each floor is a HP Thorn leading down to Floor -1. Touching it removes 100 HP from you at a time, provided you have more than 100. How much can you offer up in a single run?

Sacrificial Lamb: A pitiful monster is on floor #, surrounded by a bunch of super powerful elites from across many floors! Die to it, but not to the elites, to bolster it's confidence! All enemies in this room are invincible. If you die to the wimp enemy you restart the floor as if a time crystal has been used, with quest completion. Let anything else get the final hit on you and it's game over.

Time Crystals

Could these possibly allow you to retry failed challenges?

Arena

Being able to pay essence to retry (difficult, not pushblock/kill in order) failed challenges here would be nice, alternatively!

Robin Quest

Top Shot: Finish 100 enemies off with the bow in a single arcade run. Make every shot count!

 

[Own]

Oh, and now that we have the potion system in... could we get an NPC that sells faces, too? So we could quickslot four different faces we own onto it, to better communicate immediately in arcade. Like...

- Winking
- Rolling eyes
- Ticking stopwatch (Hurry up)
- Thumbs-up
- Thumbs-down
- An outline of a heart with a little red in it's bottom, edges pulsing a blackish red. (Almost dead)
- AFK
- Cheering
- Flexing arm
- Exploding fireball
- RIP gravestone
- Shield
- Rapidly moving boots (Run away!)
- Stopsign (STOP!)
- Nanivaface (Trolly)
- Bagface (Grumpy/Annoyed)
- Trunkface (Excited)
- Health orb (Need to go heal)
- Coins turning into a sword (Need to shop)

 

[Own]

More quest ideas.

Time Rewritten

Pidgy laments a mistake in her past, that cannot be remedied in the present. But what if words were said when they would have mattered?

Take a letter from her to Tai Ming Past. A mailbox there is guarded by a super elite echo of madness. Defeat him, put the letter in the box and hope that, eventually, it finds it's way to where it needs to go through the years. Adds Grampa Joe to the park with Pidgy.

Applied Training

You've done a few perfect guard challenges for the Dojo, now put it to the test. You begin with a permanent buff/debuff on that damages enemies -only- when you perfect guard them. But any enemy not killed with a perfect guard will damage you. Reach floor #. Alternatively, just kill # enemies with perfect guards in a single trip through the dungeon.

How sweet!

Reach floor 5 with any Muffin treat active. Incentivizes actually trying them out.

How sour!

Reach floor 5 with any Candy curse active. Incentivizes actually trying them out.

Wishing Well?

Dump surplus gold (or essence?) in here to unlock cosmetic changes across Arcadia!

- Balloons or a hot air balloon start rarely drifting across the horizon during the day.
- A little pirate ship begins occasionally sailing across the distant sea.
- A firework occasionally shoots up and bursts in the sky at night.

A Quest for Manhood!

Bella arrives in the park, having kicked Edward off into the dungeon to prove himself by slaying the most horrible beast. Edward appears at the start of each floor, asking for a little assistance in getting a farther. Some talent orbs, some gold, some of your max HP or EP. Finally, in Mt. Bloom, you find him in a cage, saying he's worn down the beast, but it captured him. And you must finish it off.

The Elite Green Slime.

Leave Only Footprints

Try to get through the dungeon while causing as little damage as possible! Avoid going into as many rooms as you can. Each time you visit any room you lose 5 max HP. Reach floor # while visiting as few rooms as you can before your HP completely runs out!

 

[Own]

Man's Best Friend

The shop on Floor 1 has a dog biscuit for sale for 5,000 gold... the Tai Ming dog sits in a ? room in Tai Ming. How can you hope to bring him home?

Get insurance, build up a ton of gold, die, go back in, buy that dog biscuit and slog your way all the way there! Bring the dog biscuit to the dog to get a doghouse outside your house (if you have one) with him sitting by it.

(edit - or... I've misunderstood how Insurance works. Doesn't let you keep some gold from your run on to the next run? Oh, well.)

Second Chances

(NPC) appears in a ? room and offers to join your town, with a contribution of 10,000 gold... if you can guess which hand they're hiding a coin in. They claim that only time could best them. No matter which you pick, it'll be wrong! Die using a time crystal on the same level, go back and pick the other hand to recruit them. Sneaky way to use time crystals for a quest.

Dusk Till Dawn

Your clocktower is on the fritz! Pine needs a second set of hands to remedy the situation. Every room you enter in the dungeon starts off at night time, full of random late-game elite enemies. After 10 seconds it becomes day, and they poof into normal enemies. Make it to floor 3 to recruit (Tannie? Nolea? Tannie's assistant?) and keep the tower from breaking. Just a quest for avoiding super strong enemies for a little bit.

 

[Own]

Building ideas!

Museum/Gallery

A bunch of empty pedestals/wall sections are in here! You can rarely find unidentified antiques within the dungeon, obtained as either extremely rare drops from elites, or from special ? rooms filled with many elite monsters. Bring them to the museum to have them identified and be able to place them where you wish.

These could range from paintings of the season elders, to decorative urns, to a golden chicken, etc

Depending on which items you display in your museum, different types of NPCs could visit it. If you draw a big enough crowd, you might be rewarded with replicas for your home!

Library/School

A strange place of barren shelves that randomly fills in over time played. Each shelf, when full, provides either tips about fighting certain enemies or completing certain challenges, or gives scraps of information about Arcadia, Lost Souls, the dungeon, etc.

 

[Own]

Middley and Poorie seem redundant, both having the same function. Seems like one should have a different purpose. Like...

Savings Bond - Put 5,000, 10,000 or 25,000 gold into a savings account that will pay out in the total sum of all floors reached put together, excluding the first.

Say you put 10,000 gold into an account. You'll be paid it back with an interest of (#)% after you've reached a sum of... a random example, 100 floors.

So your first run you reach floor 7. 2+3+4+5+6+7. That's a sum of 27. If you reach floor 7 four more times you'll get your money back with interest.

Also, new prospective building:

Hunters Guild

All out of quests to do? Come to the Hunters Guild, where you'll always have a new job waiting for you from a pool of random, potential quests bounty hunting quests!

The Hunters Guild lets you try to take on powerful foes for a bit of extra coin, or other rewards.

Examples -

The Spinning Scoundrel - There's a elite Spinsect bouncing about where it doesn't belong. Slay it on F3 for a reward.
The Frostbite Fellows - A gang of Frostlings have migrated south for the season! They've set up shop on F5, clean their clocks and send 'em back where they came from.
The Robotic Rascal - An elite Brawler bot has a serious malfunction! It's punching everything it can get it's hands on on F4. Think you're up for decommissioning it?

Just needs to pick an enemy, or group of enemies, from a further floor and set them in a special room for players to try and take them on while going through the dungeon. Maybe the player could get extra rewards for beating 5, 25, 50 and 100 bounty hunt quests.

Mostly I'd like to see something like this because it takes away the "Well, I'm out of quests... darn ):" feeling away from Arcadia while waiting for new updates.

 

[Own]

Stylish Hats & Replica Blacksmith

Mr. Hat & Wyl's shop exclusively for locking things into your cosmetic slots before runs, based on standard equipment! Hats, facegear, weapons and shields. To unlock something at the shop and secure a permanent 'look' for yourself, you need only kill a certain number of enemies in Arcade across all runs with the actual piece of gear equipped!

So, kill # enemies with the Chicken Hat equipped to unlock it in Arcadia for buying and locking in as your cosmetic look. Wyl can let you lock in a 1H and 2H option as well when using her menu, in case you find yourself switching mid-run!

Church of Grindea

The teacher from Tai Ming has gotten her own little chapel! But she doesn't want people to come to pray, she wants them to revere the Goddess as the heroes of old did! Flawlessly slay summoned monsters with nothing more than your starting sword and shield in the small church.

Enemies you can choose to face off against are elites, but with less health given your lack of gear or levels. Losing a single point of health loses you the challenge.

A combat-based version of the dojo.

Wizard's Tower

Feeling a little bummed that you can't have your favorite summoned buddies join you in your town? Don't worry, the wizard can write harmless scrolls that only work in Arcadia town to conjure up your magical friends that follow you around! You can buy Snow Scroll and Cloud Scroll here. Each one can be upgraded two more times for more gold. These are purely cosmetic and don't follow into the dungeon proper.

 

[Own]

Gotchapon Machine



A tempting machine filled with all sorts of colorful balls! For the tavern, or a gambling hall, or... somewhere?

During your playthrough of the dungeon you will occasionally acquire golden tokens, which you can bring to the Gotchapon machine to insert and get a ball. Balls can contain:

- A small amount of town gold.
- An essence.
- A random egg.
- A cheap piece of furniture.
- A medium cost piece of furniture. (Uncommon)
- An expensive piece of furniture. (Rare)
- 100,000 town gold (Jackpot!)
- A fairy for your fae tree! (How long have they been stuck in there?! Super rare! Limit one.)
Maybe some other things?

A good way to get extra furniture for your home to experiment with, beyond just buying what you think you might need. Make the best of what the game gives you to design a home with.

Alternatively, this could be an unlockable for shops in the dungeon. Deposit 1,000 gold to turn the machine and get Arcadia town prizes.

Could also insert gold/etc in it in the shop to get random dungeon rewards or items too, I guess, but one more way to get random loot does seem repetitive.

 

[Own]

The Gadget Shop

Your one-stop shop for various odd items in Arcadia.

Stopwatch - Use this to have a timer run in the bottom right corner the moment you enter the dungeon. Use it again to toggle it to only record time spent during battles. Use it again to disable.

Fidget Tamer - Is your friend taking entirely too long at the shop, or on a potty break? Use this in your inventory to launch an endless pet taming minigame simulation. It begins at level 1, and steadily gains progress to level 2 with each correct input. Progress to next level is lost upon each failed press. As the Fidget Tamer levels, it gets faster and gains increasing amounts of inputs. Serves no purpose but time wasting.

Fishfinder - Plays a 'ding' if what you're hooked on during the fishing minigame is a fish you haven't currently caught for your aquarium. Useful for cancelling and casting again.

 

[Own]

Domesticated: Sure, you can get up to 100 of each pet, but why would you want to?

For each 25 of a specific type of pet you obtain in Arcade Mode, Oak bestows upon you a non-duplicatable version of that pet you can place inside your home. Awe your friends as you show them to your four Elder Rabby room!

---

Also, to expand on a suggestion I made a while back... daily seed runs. Seed runs give everyone who plays them the same randomized:

- Perks
- Curses/Treats
- Floors and encounters
- Skillpoints auto-assigned in the same 4-5 random spells/skills/utilities
- The same random auto-assigned talents

Each floor you clear on the first time you play the randomized seed grants you a token, which can be used for the Grindapon machine in Arcadia to get small/medium/large amounts of gold, essence, or cheap/decent/expensive housing items, or other things. Having a new daily experience and getting cool things I might otherwise not have used to deck my house out with would be really, really nice.

 

[Own]

More Gadget Shop Things

Petfood Vending Machine - Adds a vending machine near the stairs leading to the dungeon, to buy petfood without having to go all the way down and deal with oak!

Petfood Franchise Machines- Adds a Petfood Vending Machine to every shop in Arcadia. Petfood bought still uses town gold? Or gold you're actually carrying during your current arcade run?

 

[Own]

Dimensional Door Destinations

A completely blank building, when first you enter it! An NPC outside will inform you that this building can be used to obtain glimpses of far off places, and to likewise share your own in the sea of visions.

This building can be used to view the homes of anyone who have chosen to upload their home on a sort of leaderboards for browsing. You can do nothing but explore them and possibly rate them, and positively rating homes prompts their owners to be rewarded with a small amount of town gold, essence or something else. Maybe there could even bea a random weekly theme, where people could upload custom houses to, and houses that receive the most votes for fitting that theme get displayed in a lineup. Could have themes like Arena, Restaurant, Inn, Church, Dungeon, Crypt, Enchanted Forest, Ice Palace, etc.

 

[Own]

After we buy the home in Arcadia, perhaps we could buy furniture from the Shady Merchant that only appears via non-buyable means in Story Mode? So we could spend large sums of gold earned across our run to buy, for example, a Flying Fortress Painting on F7-8, a Painting of Seasons on F11-12, a Catface Screen on F13-14, a Tai Ming Statue on F15-16 (assuming we can't already just get lucky and craft those mid-run, keep them after the run is over?) Small Clocks, Potted Cactus, etc as well.

Or is the plan that these things will just be added to our Arcade save when we get them in Story Mode, like the Frost Badge?

 

[Own]

If you're set on having all players share nest slots, maybe we could buy an enterable chicken coop with extra nest slots? Have it begin with three extra nest slots, and every additional slots (up to 9 total) costs more gold? For the players who gain eggs faster than they can hatch them, or for co-op fun.



... maybe it'd look better elsewhere, thouh. Kinda takes away from the aquarium.

 

[Own]

Shadier Merchant

... is pretty much a waste of an ? room. Every time I play with friends (good and bad at the game), no one really wants to buy anything from him because it's not worth it. Spend a ton of health for... what? An item you'll be able to get naturally in 1-2 floors? That gives +5-10 ATK, MATK or Defense? The only thing anyone actually buys is the time crystal, and that's more for fun than anything. Besides that, who wants to spend 100 max health on snow shoes?

For the health cost to really be worth it, he should be stocking items from floors 3-4 ahead of where you are.

Shadier Expansion

When you first transition the town into night via the bell tower, a message pops up.

Someone new has arrived in town...?, with a blank silhouette. A bush in town only at night occasionally gives off a [?]. Talk to it and you're presented with the option to invest essence into 'smuggling some goods down the dungeon'. Each time you upgrade this, the Shadier Merchant gains additional wares slots.

Shields

We have shields that double energy projectile damage. Shields that take no damage on a PB. Shields that make enemies hurt themselves. Shields that freeze enemies. But I'm not sure why these are set in stone in Arcade.

It would be more interesting for shielding if each seed randomized shield bonus effects, for anything not the wooden/iron shield. So a Barrel Shield could have the Worm Shield's special effect, or the Wisp Shield could make enemies hurt themselves.

Maybe this would require a lot of coding, though... so maybe not worth it.

The Fishin' Hole

An expansion bought at the Aquarium, adds a little fishing hole somewhere indoors, or out in town. Only contains fish you've already caught in the dungeon in it, fish your friends have caught aren't in your own personal selection of fish. You gain a tiny bit of town gold depending on what type of fish you catch. A wimp would be something like 1, while a Goldfish might be 10-15. Just a timewaster to invest time into while your friends are AFK, or waiting for them to join. An alternative to sitting around Arcadia doing nothing.

 

[Own]

Tai Ming's herding challenge

... seems like a placeholder? It's 'defeat the enemies trying to attack the chickens with no special gimmicks', which was last seen on F1-2. F3-4 has red slimes to goop up and slow things down, Season Temple has summer wizards growing thorns around them.

Ideas off the top of my head:

- Invincible monkey(s) walk around, picking chickens up and throwing them at random places.
- Chickens are immune to being hit in any way by players. A lone monkey tries to attack players, or pick the chickens up and throw them at random players. You want to lure the monkey to the chickens, stand in front of the chicken hut, lure him into throwing them in.
- A thorn worm tentacle is rising up from the ground and attacking chickens.
- An invincible monkey is picking up an invincible, immobile statue and throwing it around to disrupt the herding with shockwaves.

Phaseman's bullets

... still seem a little bugged!

Mega Green Orb: 39 dmg
Red Orb: 40 dmg
Purple Blast Orb: 156 dmg

The fact that a summon can just brush off that initial green orb, or it can be taken on the shield, makes it so not a threat. It should be doing like 200-300 at least!

Sunken Treasures

A bonus for the aquarium. Every fishing area has an extremely rare, low catch chance to snag an aquarium treasure in it. These are extra, small decorations to line the flooring of your Arcadia aquarium.

Pillar Mountains: Pillar Castle
Evergrind Forest: Sunken Treasure Chest
Pumpkin Woods: Pumpkin-headed Scuba Diver
Seasonne: Sword in a Stone / Icecube
Mt. Bloom: Coral/Mushroom Reef
Pirate Ship Dungeon (if it will have one?): Sunken Pirate Ship

 

[Own]

Alteeernatively, instead of the Gotchapon Machine...

... why not have the town well serve a similar purpose, by way of wishing well? So the well has a purpose.

Using the timer that the egg hatching works off, but instead of an hour it refreshes every 5-10 minutes spent in the dungeon. The fountain gets a [!] over it, you can approach it and are given the option to toss in 100 gold. If you do, you receive a random furniture item.

 

[Pharphis]

Ok, I took a break from the game for a year but have been working through the new arcade mode (btw I LOVE the improvements, except for health potions not healing very much)

My only major complaint is a long-standing one, which is that it is really annoying to wait for the "equip this" popup to toggle through them, and even more annoying when I want to level up and am stuck waiting for an item or two. This isn't a big deal in adventure mode since you don't level as often, but in arcade mode you run into this problem at least several times per run.

A simple fix is to set the level up key to being a different button (left bumper instead of right) so I'm not stuck waiting, or accidentally equipping something. Sometimes I accidentally equip something because it flies at me while I am just starting to press down the key to level up.

Another QoL suggest is for the "quick level" bar, add just 1-2 more slots. I find that if I make it as far as Winter in arcade mode, I end up level a sixth skill or passive, which means that my quick bar will no longer have the thing I desire to level first on my next run (since it has been bumped out of the queue.

Alternatively, there could be an option to have a default quick bar to start each run.. but that's probably more tedious to code and for the user as well. I know 6-7 things will look a bit more crowded but the point is to use it very quickly anyway

 

[Own]

You can press ESC (or I think cancel on the controller) to skip the current 'Wanna equip this?' item prompt.

And I think Teddy said he was going to expand skills/talents in quicklevel to 10 each.

 

[Pharphis]

That's good news.

I also found that although sometimes the popup doesn't show up randomly for level-ups, it still bring sup the quick-level bar if you hold down the button anyway.