Hey everyone!
We are currently knee-deep in the visual overhaul of the whole game. Patrick is doing a great job working on textures for 3d assets and I am grinding away on the UI. But that is something for another devlog when the results are presentable. Today I'd like to talk about our haunted place system a bit more.
This video is an introduction to haunted places, but I'll briefly explain them again. Ritual places and possession are predominant themes in the story of BattleJuice Alchemist and now they become even more relevant mechanics-wise. In the picture above you see our very first haunted place, the Chopping Block. You solve a small riddle to activate it and then fight the possessed site itself. It is able to do a multitude of attacks like spawning minions, AOE damage, debuffs and so on.
To make buildings more fun to explore, I decided to add two more haunted places that do not spawn in the wilderness but inside structures. The Begging Bowl spawns in churches and the Creepy Container in abandoned farm houses.
You can repeatedly activate a haunted place and defeating it gets more difficult each time you do so. In the end you get to choose a reward for your efforts. I found this to be a bit underwhelming and wanted to flesh out these events. So I decided that after "leveling up" a haunted place, you can activate it a last time, which spawns a unique enemy that is the warden of the place. Here is a little impression of the Biting Barrel that appears at the "Creepy Container":
So that's it for today. Please note that these changes are on our internal testing branch only and not yet on the public playtest version on Steam. I will update the Steam version not too far in the future, but want to wait for the big visual overhaul to do so.
That is it for today, thank you for reading and have a nice weekend!
Alain