It’s been a while since we had a post with design decisions and the main reason for that is simply that we haven’t had much to talk about! I’ve been busy making stuff for the desert town while Teddy has been implementing all of the stuff me and Fred made for Arcadia. Recently we sat down to talk about two things though, and the subjects of those talks can be found in the title…

First up the Arcadia version of the Farm. Our first idea was that this place would be a place where you could get taming items and capture the same enemies that you can currently catch in Story Mode, which will then start living in the pasture outside the farm (or inside town if you decide to leave the gate open).

After some discussion we thought this would be a little underwhelming though, seeing as you don’t bring along your pets here as you do in story mode. So instead, our goal is that you’ll be able to tame not only all of the enemies, but also that you’ll be able to capture several of the same species, and decide yourself how many of each or which of the animals you want to display in the farm. To do this we’ll add an interface showing how many of each animal you currently own and how many are currently outside in the pasture.

To catch these animals you’ll use bait in the same way as you do in Story Mode, but you’ll be able to buy more from Oak in order to capture more of the same kind. Chickens will be the main exception to this. They will instead be acquired through eggs that you can purchase from Chika, who will also be present in the Arcadian farm. The eggs can be placed in nests inside the farm building, and take a set amount of ingame time before they hatch.

At the moment you’ll only be able to capture the animals available as pets in Story Mode, but our goal is to be able to tame and keep each type of enemy in the pasture.

Meanwhile, Haddock’s role in Story Mode has been quite underwhelming outside of him giving you a fishing rod early on. To remedy this, we’re having him give you quests, where the rewards are aquariums for your housing house. Each aquarium has enough space for a set number of fishes (which you select yourself from the ones you keep in your inventory). There will be a variety of sizes available and each come with different styles of inside decoration. As for the quests, they will be centered around fishing and presenting Haddock with different fishes.

Now, time for some mixed Arcadia fixes! I know we’re not completely done with the Desert Town, but I needed to go back to Arcadia to fix these things so Teddy can continue implementing ’em. First up, we decided to change the name of:

..to the slightly more ominous:

Our reasoning here was that a ‘challenge’ sounds like something it’s possible to overcome, while the idea of these insane runs is more a case of seeing how far you can get before the inevitable end.

Speaking of insane runs, the boss practice in the Arena needed a new interface where you get a ranking ranging from S to D on your encounter with said boss. Points will be deduced if you take hits or take very long to finish:

Next up, here’s a little reminder of what Master Ji’s dojo looked like when I was done with it:

…and the reason I’m showing it is so you can compare it to this smaller version:

We decided to make it smaller to make better room for the camera and just limit the space in general: there’s really no reason to run around to much when your main goal is to shield the enemies!

Next, another reminder, this time of the farm:

As mentioned, you’ll be able to hatch chickens from (enormous) eggs, so I went ahead and made the nests where these will be placed:

Investigating an egg will give you a hint of how much time remains before the egg is ready to hatch (though in rather vague terms ranging from ‘not in a while’ to ‘soon’, hah! The actual amount of time it’ll take will be decided on as we continue testing.

Next up, some small interface things, namely a button for selecting shield training and ‘shop title’ windows for when you talk to Master Ji, Muffin or Candy respectively:

We’re not completely done with Arcadia yet, and with our new ideas for the farm, it’s time for me to put together some basic interfaces for the new features.

First, an interface for deciding how many animals of each kind you want roaming around the pasture/full map:

The numbers are placeholder for now but are supposed to be how many animals are currently outside vs how many you have in total. The % will be a / in the final version, I just quickly used the % here to make sure there was enough room for everything:

Next, an interface for equipping taming items. We’ve decided that you’ll only be able to carry one taming item with you on your arcade run, to avoid cheese strats where you carry an infinite amount and tame all the difficult enemies rather than battle them. On the flip side of this we also decided that you’ll be able to use the same taming item until you’ve successfully tamed an enemy, rather than having to buy a new one every time.

In the interface, you’ll see the taming item on the left, and what enemy it tames to the right:

Of course, in order to get to this portion of the menu, a button is needed. We considered using the regular Buy button, but since this doesn’t work the same way the regular shop interface does, we made a new one for buying Taming Items:

Meanwhile, the eggs Chika sells will be available in a regular shop, which means it needs a shop title box, as seen below:

Next we have another portrait! This is the second armwrestler, the opponent of the one shown last week. A quick reminder of the sprite version:

The one is actually a young lady, but not much more is known about her for now. Most of these Saloon NPCs will probably mainly be background characters that won’t get much of a story of their own, but never say never! It’s always good to have a number of spare characters for upcoming quest ideas.

Progress and finished portrait:

Fred continues to take requests on animations given by Teddy as he fleshes out the revamped Arcade Mode. Most recently, we needed a receptionist for the Aquarium which will house your collected fishes. Since we have but one master of the fishing rod, we decided to put him on duty here as well, and in doing so give him an animation from the side:

Next, a little something to help enhance Master Ji’s shield training! This shield will appear whole or break, depending on whether you win or lose his current challenge:

Here’s a little sneak peek of what it currently looks like, though we’ll likely change a few details:

As for the pet business, we thought there should be a slightly bigger fanfare to capturing the pets now that they very clearly get sent down to Arcadia rather than go with you (perhaps we should add this effect to story mode as pets get sent to the farm as well):

Finally, another inhabitant of the desert town, a guy who might just have spent a little too long in the sun (or perhaps should have removed his sunglasses first):

This week it’s time to start work on the upper right corner of the desert town, featuring the market area! In this first video, I’ll be making the first market stand which will serve as a base for the rest. The first one here belongs to someone selling jars: how exciting. …Or maybe not!

In the second part of the Marketplace, I’m making a bigger stand featuring three different sellers: one who sells weapons, one who sells potions and one who sells shields. A little more useful for the player, compared to the previous one, perhaps :)

Before continuing on with the market, have a portrait! This one is of one of the armwrestlers from two weeks ago:

The WIP:

…and finished sprite:

The final part of the marketplace means making three new stands, one for carpets, one double for hats/accessories and one for souvenirs! Also changed the color of the jar stand to further separate the stands from one another:

Meanwhile, this week Fred has worked on a bunch of NPCs! Not only will there be an autumn fae bandit leader in the Saloon, you’ll also get to see a couple of old friends(?), who may or may not be too excited about running into you again:

In the desert town more NPCs are appearing as well, and here’s one of them, a swimmer enjoying the clear water:

As Teddy continues to implement Arcadia Rework stuff, one or two new animations were requested as well. Here’s an animation featuring the gate to the farm, which can be either open or closed. If it’s open, the animals you keep at the farm will be able to roam around the entire map, while if it’s closed they’ll be kept inside the pasture:

Time to make Grindeas first set of boats! Starting with a small and rather simple one, there will be several more before we’re done. This is actually the first time I’m drawing boats, so bear with me and expect several stages of improving and adding details to these as we continue on.

Without further ado, the first one:

The second boat is actually more of a ship! There will be another similar one of these nearby, too. As you can see in the WIP video below, at first the sail was down, but as it was pointed out to me you don’t keep sails down while in port… I changed it (I know absolutely nothing of ships but it was a pretty dumb thing to not realize sooner! I’m sorry!)

WIP and finished thing:

Time for the third “boat”, which also is no regular boat, but a houseboat! I’m not 100% this is the color scheme we’ll go for in the end, but for now it’s a green, red and brown quirky kind of deal:

The final boat post this week and the final boat in the port: another smaller vessel this time, filled with cargo! Maybe it has come in from a bigger ship docked outside the harbor area?

As for Fred, this week he continues to make NPCs for the Saloon! As mentioned last week, there will be a lot of different characters here, and not all are human… Below is another selection of people visiting or working at this place: a bartender cleaning a glass, a caveling using a slot machine, someone at the bar, and a pianist for entertainment!

…and yes, Teddy is still working on implementing all the new Arcadia systems! Keep in mind there’s a lot of new mechanics to add, so it’s taking a little while. He’s aaaalmost done and ready to let us inhouse test before handing it over to you guys though! Stay with us just a couple of more weeks~

With the desert town progress underway, we decided to make a few changes on the right side of the map before I start rendering those houses. Here’s the original sketch (please excuse the house on the left side which I forgot to remove before saving this):

We decided to change the bottom left house in the picture below to one big two-story house instead, and add a large crate on the right house with a jump down, as well as another jump down on the lower level of the left house. This will make the houses stand out a bit more from the rest, and will look more interesting overall.

We also decided to add an entrance to the topmost house and move the marketplace a bit accordingly. We found that it having no entrance looked a bit empty, and the market place will probably only look better if it’s a little more pushed together:

On to the Ice cream parlor, which as I mentioned had a problem with the mirrored windows. I fixed this and added some silhouettes showing through the glass:

And now, since we have done a bit of work on the lower left side of the map, I decided to tie things together a bit by adding the remaining houses and some decorative stuff. I also replaced the church’s weaponry with Grindea-related imagery:

Now, the desert town creation continues with two new houses, a pair of buildings linked together by a rather thin pair of planks! The one on the left is supposed to be the living quarters of someone, while the one on the right is thought to be a warehouse of sorts. Not sure if both will be open or if we’ll close the doors on the warehouse until we can figure out a cool quest or something to happen in there.

For now, here’s the progress of the exterior:

Next we have the harbor, a rather big undertaking that will have to be divided in multiple parts! First up, the core of it all, the bridges:

These bridges will lead to a number of boats of different sizes, which will be what I focus on next. There will be crates and NPCs unloading cargo and strange items here as well, which is why this part is quite big compared to the rest of the town. By the time everything is finished we hope it’ll be all bustling with activity!

And now, time for another desert portrait! This time it’s the grandpa of the gardener family, the father of the mother who keeps pulling out poor baby carrots. His sprite, made by Fred, was posted a couple of weeks ago first:

This week Fred has been working on a bunch of NPCs, these too for the desert area. First up is several iterations of the NPC responsible for the jumping vegetable enemies posted before! This guy is an old gardener who has become a little.. unhinged in later years… I will say no more than that! Here’s a bunch of iterations, with the final version inside the green circle:

Next up, it’s time to fill the Saloon with people! While the interior of the Saloon hasn’t been made yet, there will be a ton of people there, so Fred has already begun working on a bunch of them!

First, there are two people in the midst of arm wrestling, and a trio playing cards:

There will be more like these coming, as we hope to create a feeling of the Saloon being bustling with activity, card games and entertainment :)

Another week and more desert progress! This week it’s time to begin making those houses that will appear in the desert town. First up is the church, where a certain follower of Grindea will appear:

In the beginning we thought it’d be fun to have a sword at the top of the building, kind of emulating the way churches here in the west have crosses up there, but we’ll probably replace this to something more associated with Grindea later on, such as a bigger version of Essence or something along those lines. For now though, here’s what it looks like:

Next building is the Ice Cream parlor! A place where you’ll be able to get a yummy snack. In the final image below, the window got mirrored so the light on it comes in opposite directions. I will fix this in the final version and possibly put silhouettes of ice creams through the glass as well.

Here’s the WIP:

And the next part of town I’ll focus on is the beach! A place where people go to relax and enjoy the pleasant weather around this area. Maybe play some beach volleyball or take a swim in the water:

The water around the area looks a little lacking right now, but I plan on asking Fred to make some animations for waves coming onto the shoreline, ans well as the usual water decorations:

Now, another portrait! Continuing on with the family of gardeners, it’s time to make a portrait of the father, the guy with the pot of unknown liquid:

And here’s the WIP:

As the Arcadia rework is well on its way, Fred has moved on to make a couple of things needed for it, in this case a sprite of Candy that isn’t hidden behind her giant cauldron, and a cute little familiar we decided to add that tags along with her:

How cute! Wouldn’t you like to have one of those familiars of your own? ….Well, maybe you will. Maybe you will.

Another week, and work on the desert continues! Before I start sketching the town layout, I wanted to get a feeling of how the houses would look like, so I began to sketch a bunch of alternatives for random basic buildings. Like the house in one of the desert maps, these have a slightly different design compared to the rest of the houses in the game, much like the buildings in Tai Ming:

Once I was done with the sketches, I added a character sprite and quickly realized they were much bigger than they would be in game, so I resized them to fit better:

In order to truly grasp what they look like, I decided to make a few of them in the actual artstyle too. This will give a better feel for color and shape, and I’ll be able to use these houses in the game, or at least parts of them, depending on what the final town design ends up being.

Here’s the WIP:

Alright, time to start looking at the desert town! …Neither the desert nor the desert town has been named yet, I guess we’ll have to fix that sooner or later… But anyway! As mentioned, we had already decided on a bunch of major things we wanted to include in the town, among those a church, an ice cream parlor, a marketplace, a beach and a harbor area with ships. With this in mind I began making a sketch of what I imagined the area to look like, with the list of features in mind:

As always with these sketches, we added it as a flat background to the game and ran around in it, imagining it the way it’d look when everything is done. It led us to a bunch of changes:

* Adding more water to the bottom and left, making sure the camera doesn’t stop scrolling when you near the edge of the land. This makes it more pleasant to the eye and helps give a feeling that the sea is more vast.

* The bridge near the harbor area would be increased in size, both in regards to width as well as length. We plan on adding a bunch of NPCs to make it seem bustling enough. We also added more ships, to increase the sense of it being a lively port.

* We reduced to overall size of the entire thing (but just slightly), with the exception of the beach which we found to be of adequate size.

* We made the north entrance a bit more fancy looking, having space for a couple of guards rather than palm trees being the very first thing you run into. We also moved the fountain near the northern entrance to a more central position.

Here’s the upgraded version, and what we’ll use as a base for the city:

And as Fred keeps making NPCs, I get to make more portrait. This time it’s for the lady gardener, struggling to get the vegetables growing (maybe if she stopped pulling them up and let them grow it’d go better, but who am I to judge). Here’s the sprite, for those who forgot:

And here’ the WIP and final (for now) portrait:

A quick break to fix some Arcadia things that popped up! To begin with, Bishop’s challenges of course needs a interface of its own:

The basic design is pretty much the same as Master Ji’s shield training, but instead of having either a star or nothing, this interface will show you what floor you reached on your best run during a challenge! Completing a whole run will give you a gold star, though to be honest we don’t expect a lot of people to manage that:

A slight adjustment has been made to the inventory title box in Arcadia as well… For as you can see, the original version includes bag:

…and since bag is not included in Arcade Mode, we simply replaced him with trunk instead:

The health pot also won’t be available from Remedi’s potions in Arcadia. It’s possible we’ll include an Arcade-only potion, but until we come up with one or in case we don’t, we made a special icon showing that the health pot is unavailable in this mode:

Teddy’s working on implementing each of the new buildings, and while working on Muffin’s Treats we realized we need to edit how the item frame(s) look:

As you can see the item frames are a bit too big for the treat icons, so I made a slightly edited version of the fancy one in the description box that will be used for these! As I took the opportunity to upgrade the overall look of it, we decided to update the regular item frames in the rest of the game to look more like it as well:

As for the selection frames, they will be using the treat/curse frames seen in the bottom UI instead, but at the time of the screenshot, they hadn’t been implemented just yet.

Next, we forgot that you of course need to browse to Treats, Curses and Challenges in a popup window (same as when you select buy or talk in shops), so they needed icons as well:

Finally, a minor edit: we decided to change name of Trunk of Tricks to Trunk of Tips:

This way it’ll feel slightly more different from Bag of Tricks :)

As for Fred, this time around he has animated the cacti I made a while ago! As mentioned, these won’t be destructible but will only wiggle a little when you hit ’em:

Some of them will be able to get frozen though, and those you’ll be able to destroy to make your way slightly quicker through the first desert area:

In Arcadia, a cage being built to house NPCs that you’ll be able to release during your runs after defeating a mini-boss!

Of course, it also needs an animation for when you successfully save a captured NPC and let them go:

Time to start (continue) working on the desert for real! Since the sketch is all done, it’s time to start bringing the fourth desert area to life, and we’ll start with the Saloon:

There are still a few things to do with this place, but I feel it’s best to iterate things rather than make the whole thing in one go – the best ideas usually come when you have the basics down and let it rest for a day. Instead, I’ll continue working on the basic skeleton of the area: getting the walls and general decorations down, before continuing adding props on a more detailed level!

For now, here’s what the Saloon looks like right now:

And now, time for the rest of the area! As mentioned, this is best done in several parts, starting with the basics:

The entrance to the harbor town will be in the lower parts of this area, which will be indicated by a wall of sorts, much like the wall around Evergrind City:

Next up, I’m adding a bunch of props using the editor, mainly cacti and bushes, and then, the path leading to the town and Saloon:

Then, some texture decorations of the sand and a bunch of pots:

Now it’s time to get down to detail level, adding stuff to give this area a little bit personality. First up, a few wanted posters along the way to the Saloon:

The Saloon will be a hangout for a bunch of shady characters, which will be foreshadowed by the posters above. As for the Saloon itself, there are some details left that I want to get down:

Finally, I’m adding some more stuff to the rest of the area using the editor: crates, barrels, jars, and a few bushes. In the end, here’s the area for now, more or less completed:

In the portrait area, we’re not done with the archaeologists just yet! Here’s the portrait of another one, the pink haired one shown a few weeks ago:

And the WIP:

In Fred’s department, his vegetables are now fully animated, bouncing around ready to be implemented as actual enemies:

And the female gardener from last week gets a husband who’s inside the house stirring.. a pot of water? A bland soup? Who can tell!

What we do know though, is that her father is keeping an eye on him, making sure everything is done correctly:

New week, new interfaces! This time it’s the last couple of interfaces for Arcade Mode, featuring how to build new houses and a notification window for when new NPCs are added to town:

Above is the first quick sketch of the notification box mentioned. We wanted to notify players of when new characters appear in town so they know what/who to look for. Instead of One-Handed it will say “A New Face in Town”, and instead of Defense, it’ll say the character’s name. We used to placeholder text to get a feeling for how big the fonts are.

Here’s the progress of taking the box from the sketch version to the actual one we’ll use in the game:

And the final window in its context:

Next up, building houses. When you inspect a signpost you’ll be presented with a window where Trunk informs you of what will appear in that area and how much it’ll cost. Extremely(!) detailed sketch below:

Again, bringing it from sketch to final box:

Once more we’ve used a placeholder text to get a feeling of how big text will appear inside the box. Instead of One-Handed it’ll say the name of the building, and instead of Candy’s line from Pumpkin Woods there will be a description of the house and what can be done there. The coin box to the bottom left of the window will tell you how much it costs to unlock this building, while the checkmark and x will confirm or cancel. The x will be selected by default to avoid accidentally building things you wouldn’t want.

Final version below:

Next up, a bunch of icons, featuring both curses and Bishop challenges:

This first batch are all Bishop challenges. The first one is the one where you race against time to complete each room in a specific time or get instakilled, the second represents the only elites challenge, the third is for the challenge where you’re blinded the whole time. The fourth is for the runs when you can’t level up, and the fifth and final icon is for the combined no leveling / only elites challenge:

Next up, the next bunch of curses:

The first one being where the floors turn to ice, the second where you’re surrounded by flames, the third being the curse which allows higher level enemies to spawn on lower level floors, the fourth is a curse that makes you take double damage.

The fifth is the curse which makes enemies leave something harmful behind when they die (poison clouds, acid, etc), and the last one is a slightly modified version of the bishop challenge above, for the curse which either blinds you temporarily at the start of each room, or has blinding mushrooms spread across the floor. If we go for the mushroom idea, we’ll likely change the icon, but for now this is the placeholder until we’ve tried the two modes out:

Now, in preparation to move from Arcadia to the desert, here’s some small Arcadia fixes to conclude my work there (for now):

Above is a screen of Trunk talking to Bishop, during which we realized his portrait is a little too big and feels too close to the text. First mission: make it smaller!

Second mission, giving him a proper expression for a special moment where he gets a little surprised to say the least:

This is approximately what Arcadia will look like when you first arrive, but there’s a little something missing here:

What’s that? A ruined bridge, of course! We realized it’s kind of weird that some things have already been set up on the other side of the water without any indication of how people got over, and it looks a little more interesting to have it there:

Okay, so time to move to the desert. Here we have a pathway that’s supposed to be blocked, so you have to move around the area before unlocking a way to pass through here:

And what’s stopping you? More cacti! Bigger ones, this time. Time to make a bunch:

And here they are, in their rather huge glory! We’ll probably add a bunch of these here and there to keep you from being able to destroy everything (most other decorations – the smaller cacti – can be cut down by the player, while these cannot):

Next up, another place that will be blocked until you’re actually supposed to get here:

Here, we want the stairway to be blocked by a couple of archaeologists who have made interesting findings in the area. This serves both as an introduction to the fact that there will be archaeologists here, as well as a temporary way of blocking your progress until you’re ready for the desert storyline:

(Of course I couldn’t leave the stairs looking as empty as they did, or you wouldn’t really buy why the archaeologists are interested in it..)

And with the new, more epic looking staircase, this one looks rather boring in comparison:

Time to fix the problem:

Next up, another portrait! As Fred keeps making new NPCs needed for the upcoming quests, I make the portraits to match. This time it’s another archaeologist, consulting a map. Sprite below:

And here’s the WIP:

As for Fred, this week he has been working on finishing up the vegetable lineup from last week! Here they are, in all directions:

Needless to say, these fellow will of course be animated as well, bouncing around in a cute way:

And where’s there vegetables, there’s a garden, right? Here’s a gardener, pulling up some rather small and sad looking vegetables in comparison to the lively one above:

We’re back! Hope you guys have had a great holiday, a merry christmas and a happy new year! Now it’s 2018, and 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!

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 built 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!

And now, time for more interface design, this time featuring the Arena! As a reminder, here’s what it looks like in Story Mode:

There are two categories, Challenges and VS. Challenges won’t be available in Arcade Mode, but there will be something else:

Boss practice! For those of you who have troubles with bosses, we know it’s really difficult and annoying to get chances of practicing against them as you have to survive a whole lot of regular enemies first. To give players a chance to polish their skill against these more difficult bad guys (as well as a way of learning their patterns), the Arcadia Arena will let you pick and choose among the bosses you’ve reached so far (no skipping ahead). When designing this interface, I presented two options: one featuring three bosses per page (with a scrollbar), and their name next to them:

..and another, featuring just the boss images, with their title and description shown only in the text box instead:

It’s likely we’ll go for this second version as it has room for a lot more enemies and the text box won’t be used much anyway!

Once you’ve selected the boss you want to practice against, you’ll be presented with three character slots, featuring the last three characters who reached that specific boss, with their equipped weapon and main skill of choice shown beneath them:

This is so that you’ll have approximately the right level and equipment for the boss fight (as your current Arcadia character is level 0 with no gear what so ever)! It gives an accurate representation of the fight, as it reflects how you got there last time, and allows you to try out the fight with possibly different builds (if you change playstyle between runs).

Once you’ve selected which of your old characters you want to rebattle the boss as, you’ll be transported directly to the boss room for another go at the battle! Currently, none of these will cost gold or any other value, so you can practice as much as you like :)

The next interface up on the design table belongs to the Bank and involves trading essence for gold, and gold for essence! For this interface we’ll use the Quantum Lumber interface from Housing as a base:

The main difference between the Lumber interface and the Bank’s interface is that instead of Lumber we’ll deal with Essence (obviously), and that you’ll be able to either buy Essence by handing in gold, or sell Essence and get gold back for it.

From the beginning we thought we’d deal with both in the same interface (calling it exchange instead), where you’d scroll right to get more Essence and less gold, and scroll left to get more Gold but less Essence (with a symbol for the respective currency on either side). However, we felt it’s probably easier to understand if we just call it Buy/Sell Essence and keep them separated.

Here’s our first try at a modified version of the Lumber interface:

Here, the Lumbers have each been replaced by an Essence statue. The top box will contain a number indicating how many Essence you want to buy (or sell), the number next to the big coin will let you know how much that will cost you (or how much you’ll get back for selling your precious Essence), and the number next to the Essence-with-a-coin indicates the current exchange rate (which don’t change the way things are designed now, but we thought it might be interesting to know).

The small gold coin is next to your current gold total, and the Essence-with-a-bag shows how many Essence you currently own. Pretty much like it is in the Lumber interface, in other words!

To make it more clear whether you’re in buy or sell mode, we made two variations of the above interface, one with a plus next to the top Essence icon (indicating this is the buy interface), and one with a minus (indicating this is the sell interface). There’s also a corresponding plus and minus next to the coin, to show whether you’ll gain or lose gold on the affair:

Finally, the shop menu (where you select Buy/Sell or Talk) needed two new buttons for this, so here they are as well:

Remember Trunk, the sidekick who will fill the role of (a more cheerful and optimistic) Bag in Arcade Mode? In order to communicate with you properly, he of course needs to have his own portrait:

The final version, slightly cut off to fit the text box:

Finally, there’s a bunch of NPCs made by Fred! Some of these have portraits that have been showed before, but the two on the right are brand new archaeologists that will be inspecting the old ruins and skeletons found in the desert!

Alright, back to business (ALSO SORRY THIS POST IS SO LATE! Scheduling got messed up again (I will set an alarm to check that it actually works, I promise)! As mentioned before, we’re at the point where we need to design a lot of interface stuff and decide how things will work together and unlock in terms of the new Arcadia rework features.

These include new interface indicator for gold, treats and curses when you’re running around inside Arcadia itself. Here we decided to combine Treats and Curses. Previously we said you could pick either Treats or Curses, and have three of each, but since then we have changed our minds: now, you’ll be able to pick and choose between Treats and Curses, but you can only pick 3 in total. It’s good to keep in mind that 3 isn’t a 100% fixed number at this point, we’ll have to try things out and see what feels good. The final number could be anywhere between 2-5 (is my guess, anyway).

We haven’t actually decided on which specific Treats or Curses to include yet, so if you have any cool ideas, feel free to share them with us! As a reminder, Treats are features that will make an Arcade run easier, but lowers your score, while Curses make your runs harder and increases your score!

Selecting Treats/Curses at their respective NPC will need a menu of its own too, as will the Cinema’s replay feature (where you’ll be able to view past runs), the Bank exchange service (where you can convert Essence to Gold and the other way around), and Master Ji’s challenge selection (where you pick which of his shield-focused challenges you want to try). We also need to come up with the challenges the latter will have.

The Arena will mainly use the interface from Story Mode, but we will also need a menu where you can select your last three characters that reached any boss in the game and have a go at the boss again. Here, we’ve decided to keep the Multiplayer mini-games, while the single player ones will be replaced by the boss-rebattle feature. Our reasoning here is that it might be fun to be able to challenge your friends to mini-games in the Arena without having to start Story Mode (since we have the arena anyway, you know), while the single player portion of the Arena doesn’t make as much sense to keep and works better in Story Mode alone.

There’s also another matter we need to discuss, and finalize: whether the build time of unlocked buildings will count IRL time, the time you play Arcade runs, or both. Last time we talked about this we could not decide, so now’s possibly your last chance: what would you prefer? To wait a short while regardless of what you do, to have to play arcade runs for the buildings to finish, or to be able to shorten the waiting time by playing arcade mode?

Let us know what you think!

So, time to get those new interfaces going! First up, the main interface as you run around Arcadia. Here’s the old version of the interface:

And here’s a basic suggestion with a new gold indicator and slots for Treats/Curses:

Now, the treats and curses will affect your score multiplier by a certain percentage each: either they’ll increase your score or they’ll reduce your score. More score equals more rewards (and a higher place on the high score list!), so we felt it was important to include this in the interface somehow. Here’s a quick sketch featuring the score multiplier increase both next to the score and next to the treats/curses:

While we liked the idea of having the percentage show next to the score counter (that way it can show all through your run as well), we weren’t sold on having an exact copy of it next to the treats/curses. Instead, we thought maybe we should separate them and show how much each of your curses or treats actually subtract or add to your score:

As of now, we still haven’t decided whether we want to include the above version or just keep the cleaned up score multiplier next to your score (as seen below). Do you think you’d prefer to see how much each score adds/subtracts, or is that unnecessary information that only clutters up the interface?

Next up, we’ll continue the interface business by taking a look at the interface of one of the more important new features: Treats and Curses!

For this interface the important part is having enough room for a bunch of treats/curses, with a text box featuring a description of each treat/curse, a title bar (so you know which interface you’re in), as well as some way of letting the player know when treats/curses don’t work together – for example if you have on treat that disables all elite enemies along with a curse that makes them more likely to spawn.

In the above sketch I used the potion interface as a base. There will be a few key differences though: for one, it won’t cost you money to change curses/treats, at least not the way it’s currently designed. If you’re currently hovering over a curse/treat that won’t work with the ones you have selected currently, a speech bubble popup will appear with a stop sign, showing you which ones are incompatible. Next to the curse/treat title in the text box will be how much score will be added or subtracted to your score, in percent.

Once you select a curse, a new interface will pop up where you can select which slot you want to add the curse/treat to:

In this interface there will also be a total score counter showing how much your total score will be with your selected curses/treats. In the sketch above there’s another stop sign next to the incompatible curse/treat, however this will likely not be added to the game: instead, if you try to select a curse or treat when you have others selected that wouldn’t work with it, there will be a prompt asking if you’d like to remove the ones that are incompatible with the one you’re trying to select. If you answer yes, the above interface will pop up with the incompatible curses/treats removed: if you answer no, you’ll remain in the curse/treat selection screen.

Now, time to freshen up the graphics a bit:

Here I’ve added some proper graphics to nearly everything: Muffin’s Treats has a title sprite, the pop-up speech bubble indicating which curses/treats are incompatible has been added, and the background is properly made as well. The text I haven’t touched though, as it will be added properly with the game engine.

Next, same thing but with Candy’s title sprite:

And finally, the screen where you select which slot to add your selected curse/treat to! Again, the stop sign will probably not be used the way we ended up designing things, but we hadn’t finalized that by the time I finished making the graphics:

Next, a quick portrait, with and without hat:

And Fred’s section of this post features a return to the desert and more of its inhabitants! Here’s a whole bunch of the iterations for four of the characters you’ll meet in the harbor town, with the final versions inside each green circle:

…And an animation for that poor winter fae, who has been lured into the desert by his friend! Poor thing is suffering from the less than ideal weather for a winter loving creature!

With only a few days left before Christmas, we’ll take a small break and will return on January 1st! No weekly recap next week, in other words, but we’ll make sure to post a happy holiday post to cheer you all on over the holidays :) In the meanwhile you can sneak a peek of what will be shown in the recap of Jan 1st over on my own workblog! Until then~