Hikers, Engineers, and Spark-throwers,
Let’s go straight into a deep-dive into our second biome: The Mountains!
We’re going to first talk about the design intent and showing off a few cool things. However, we’ll be revealing even more things on our Discord! Twice a week, we’ll be showing some new screenshots (both in-game screenshots but also things that give you a peek into the development process) in our Discord for you to collectively speculate over, so please look forward to that!
Why Mountains?
We always knew that we wanted to add vertical logistics. We didn’t want Oddsparks to play in a flat world! It makes the building puzzle more interesting if you have blockers and then tools to deal with that, so we built the game with verticality in mind.
We start with having a simple 1 height level difference in the woodlands, but we were always going to ramp it up to larger height difference. From there, it made sense for it to be a “mountain” area. Our original vertical slice had four core resources (wood, stone, secret and redacted), so we knew that stone was a safe bet and it fits with the mountain concept.
And of course, that means Stone Sparks!
What do you do in the Mountain biome?
The core is still the same. You’re going to find shrines, solve quests and build your workshop. However, things will be a lot more difficult in various ways. The mountain biome is:
- hard to traverse through, you’ll need to figure out your routes.
- full of aggressive enemies, you’ll need to be ready for combat.
- big, finding shrines is difficult and the distances between buildings that you need to connect is larger.
There’s genuinely a lot of new things, so we’ll break it down into three categories: Traversal, Logistics, Combat. They intersect with each other a bit, but it's just a nice way to think about the things we're about to showcase.
Traversal
Unfortunately, the player’s scrawny noodle arms can’t climb up more than one height level. However, we have a few things for you. First of all, an incredible new invention: The Ladder.
The Ladder allows you to climb up TWO height levels. This does mean you might need a few to travel to the actual plateaus of the mountains, but this is only your first and starting tool.
The mountains also have some unusual traversal tools built into it. You can ride air vents from one plateau to another, exploring the tops of the mountains. However, be careful as you explore, you might end up in the territory of some rather mean looking creatures! We’ll talk about those later though.
As you explore, you’ll find shrines that unlock new stone-based sparks. They unfortunately cannot be built in the Spark Workbench, you’ll get a new, bigger, Spark Workstation which you’ll need to build in the mountains. This means you’ll need to get your Sparks to bring items from the woodlands to the mountains and vice versa. You’ll use three new tools:
- The Zipline
- The Elevator
- The Cannon
We’ve actually already talked about the Zipline a little in an earlier devlog! These three different tools have their own awkward restrictions, but with them in combination, you can easily build your production line and bring not only items up and down the mountain, but also yourself!
You can use the zipline, elevator and cannons for traversal too!
Logistics
Sure, we now have cool logistics tools that bring items up and down things. We even have ramps so you can finally tidy up your woodlands base! However, those won’t help when you have long distances to travel.
In the woodlands, you have the Carry Spark, which we didn’t show off in the demo. The Carry Spark can carry multiple items on the path and allows for a higher throughput. With this and the new and better stone path type, suddenly, the amount of items a path network can carry is much higher than before!
With new path addons that force Sparks to wait a certain length of time, Filters for item type, spark type and number of items, you can control your throughput and manage your Sparks better! While these sorts of things don’t matter when your paths are short, they become incredibly important when your paths are long.
But that’s not all. Sure, you’ll have new bigger crates and chests, but we’ll also provide you Delivery Chests, a container for you or your Spark to store items to that villagers can access remotely! No more carrying stuff back and forth to the village. You can now give the items the villagers want directly from your production line, if that’s how you want to build it.
The last thing we’ll talk about is an unusual and we think, exciting, Spark management tool.
Sometimes the items that you need to get from one place to another is actually just another Spark. Instead of having a dedicated team of Sparks to haul spark tokens from the woodlands to the mountains, we thought, what if the Sparks can turn themselves back into a spark token?
Well, with the Spark Itemizer and Spawner (name not final), you can create a network where Stumpy Sparks that will become Crafty Sparks can carry their own ingredients!
Combat
So traversing through the mountains, getting the resources and building a production line won’t be easy due to a few things. In the mountains, most enemies are aggressive. Running away is a good idea, but not always easy, especially with a thick fog slowing you and your Sparks down.
Even unassuming creatures that aren’t aggressive, like the Pengus, have defense mechanism that makes them difficult to fight! A pengus will protect itself by shooting out a Miasma, a poisonous type of gas.
Miasma is not very fun to run through. They deal damage to you and can stun your Sparks! You’ll need to quickly call them back, or else your Sparks might die.
But of course, these gases aren’t just there to annoy you. There’s a lot of ways to use them, both for combat and even in the production line! But for now, we’ll talk about how they’re useful in combat.
Presenting... The Puffy Spark!
This guy is able to pull in lighter enemies (possibly even stunning them), pull in a bunch of items into one spot, and they can pull in and carry fog and miasma. Once filled, you’ll be able to bring fog and miasma to other enemies and make some fights easier or use it as a way to damage enemies!
So many things!
And we haven’t even talked to you about everything!
We haven’t talked to you about a very special type of Spark. We haven’t talked to you about other special enemy abilities. We haven’t talked about the challenges you’ll face when you’re able to finally be able to create an infinite source of Aether Shards.
However, we do want to keep a few things a surprise. We look forward to showing you it all on April 24th! If you want even more things to look and speculate at, join our discord where we'll be showing off a few things twice a week as a little countdown to our release.
So tell your friends about us, hang out with us at our Discord, and tell us any demo feedback and thoughts over at the Steam Discussions, or even email us at [email protected].