Kandria
Preparing for Region 2
Well, this week was mostly spent working on new platforming mechanics, fixing bugs, and revising some existing UI.
There's a few more mechanics that are planned to be included, but even with what we have now there's a lot of variety and challenge that can be gained from stringing them together in different ways. With these mechanics ready, I should be good to proceed on implementing Region 2!
This region is going to be completely new in terms of visuals and primary mechanics. As opposed to Region 1 that you're already familiar with, Region 2 has a focus on open caverns with water and wind tunnels. It also features another faction that we haven't really talked about yet... maybe in the future though!
Tim
I was hoping to finish the act 2 mainline quests this week to first draft quality, but I just need a little more time since we decided to rework how one of the quests is done; you can now encounter it much earlier in the game if you choose to explore. Although most of the quests will be NPC triggered as the narrative progresses, we want some you can discover by accident, to give the game a more open-world feel. We've designed most quests to run in parallel with others, and to have non-linear tasks within them; but this "discoverable" approach will help the game feel even more non-linear.
I also thought of a tweak to the motivation of the game's main villain, whom we've not really introduced yet (the leader of the Wraw). This came after watching the movie House of Flying Daggers, a great film that I've not seen for years. It's nothing from that movie, but it made me recall a well-realised villain from another wuxia film. It made me rethink the way I'm framing the bad guy, since the best villains have motivations that get you onside with their thinking. Anyway, I've not mentioned this to Nick yet (!), but there's plenty of time before working on that act of the story.