Spooky Forest Part 1/2 progress

Hey all,

This is the first progress update since the release of Spooky Part 1 so I'm going to talk a bit about what's missing from Part 1 and what's coming in Part 2/3.

Part 1: what else is there?

I'm working on one more quest to release in a small update before Part 2. This is a small quest given by the scientist ladies, and Lin specifically gives you a Ghostlight - a lamp that can show you ghostly things you otherwise can't see. This means it will help unlock new paths and shortcuts, and let you discover otherwise hidden entities. At first, I'm planning to make it useful in the Pumpacle zone, but I aim to make it useful in the castle itself too so that it's useful beyond just the quest.

I'll be making the entity for the quest something ghostly - I was initially planning to make the Spider Lady part of this small update, but she makes more sense to be in the next update, because...

Part 2: some plans and changes

...part 2 will be about the cave! You'll enter a dark cave environment, which will require a lamp similar to the Ghostlight, except it's just a regular lamp that lights your path. You'll run into bat ladies, spider ladies, and some more entities I'll talk about later, and at the end of it all, this region's boss. It'll all be tied to a quest given by a vampire lady, who resides in a manor just by the entrance of the cave. I've already started working on both the manor and the cave environment assets, but there's a good amount of work ahead - more environmental assets, the various entities and their animations, the boss in particular won't be easy to implement, and the vampire and her manor will be a whole thing too.

I'm playing around with minecart riding inside of the cave where the idea is that it lets you travel to a new part of the cave. It will of course be tied to a unique minecart riding animation, which is also in progress right now. The main goal with this is to ensure it's a fun challenge, but not a frustrating one - I've noticed games with minecart rides that reset your progress entirely if you fail and I want to avoid that by adding checkpoints, for example.

The castle is also in Part 2 as I've mentioned before and will have a pumpkin collection quest - you might've seen the pumpkins scattered around, they're the ones. It's not a complicated quest, but it does come with a reward animation. The animations for the castle are all in progress but either need some changes or need to be fully finished - the ladder animations, and the pumpkin collection and reward animations.

The focus on the cave does mean the train won't be in this second part, but I feel like it makes more sense. The train takes you to a new area that's at the edge of the region... maybe even connected to the next region? So it would sort of take you outside the Spooky Forest, and represent the end of the Spooky Forest.

As for Part 3, the Spooky Forest will get its wave arena minigame then since that's when all the entities are going to be done. But I had a sudden idea for the arenas that could make them a bit more fun: after you beat wave arenas, you unlock a randomized effect wave arena mode - each wave the entities have random effects applied. Movement speed, damage modifiers, how much HP the entities have, and so on. The player could get random effects too, which would make things even more fun. I might implement this in the Jungle arena before Part 3, but the idea is there and it won't take long to implement once I get started.

The rest

I'm still working on polishing some old animations because there's a few I'm still not super satisfied with. The Pink Slime should be good after the last update now and the Bee Lady one's basically there, I've also finished improving the Plant Walker for the next bugfix update, but the Panthrill ones do need to be improved a bit, so expect that at some point.

And that's it for this one. I'm gonna get back to working on stuff now, the next progress update should be on the 25th unless I decide to do it earlier - see you then :)