In Fred's department, he's been busy making a ton of archery targets! Have a look at these:
Now, thanks to finally being vaccinated and not having had much proper time off this 1½ year or so that we've been dealing with the pandemic, I'm gonna go ahead and treat myself to two weeks off to enjoy life for a little bit! The blog will be back up and running on the 9th of August, so stay tuned for more stuff then :)
Until then, have a nice couple weeks, I will for sure! :)
Next up we have backgrounds for the archery challenges! These backgrounds are a lot of fun and a bit weird to make since I need to mimic a child's style of painting to the best of my ability..!
And here we have the last bunch:
This week we continue doing some archery challenge backgrounds as well! Let's have a look at three more floors:
So, with the final dungeon drawing ever closer and closer, we've been sitting down and going through a whole bunch of the floor designs we made a couple months back. As you know from before, this has lead to a couple of very basic sketches for the first couple floors, which I'm about to define even more in the coming weeks.
But we've also been going through the dungeon as a whole, or at least the first half of it or so, and we've come to a design decision I think will make this dungeon better than our original idea. In our old plans, we had a lot of "filler" rooms with various smaller challenges that were only partly designed. Now, our focus will be on slimming down the floors and mainly keeping the main challenges, such as the boss fights. The reason for this is that we feel it's likely that the final dungeon will feel strong enough without a lot of filler content, and that the ones that weren't there for story or pacing reasons, or are simple not designed enough, could be added afterwards if we feel we need more rooms. This way we can focus on the strong parts, and easily add more stuff later on, instead of starting out with a lot of rooms that fill no real purpose and may end up getting cut anyway.
As such, the flying fortress floor for instance will go from having one dodging challenge, a phase shift challenge and a boss fight with two phase men and gun-d4m, to now only having the fight with two phasemen and gun-d4m. This might seem like a downgrade to some, but given the fact that each area is represented with its own floor, we do think that this dungeon will feel long enough anyway! And keep in mind that if we feel more rooms are needed, we can always add them back in when the rest is done.
After making these changes we already feel like the dungeon feels stronger as a whole design wise. Of course, we're also making an effort to keep in the things that give the game personality, such as the cameos from characters you've met throughout the game.
With this in mind, we're now more excited than ever to continue designing this final part of Story Mode, which will tie it all together :)
More Archery challenges? We got you covered!
The next two areas we'll look into are Pumpkin Woods and Flying Fortress:
Cheers!
