May Development Log - Journey Into the Ice Caves

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May Development Log

There are a few different things I've been focused on this month but they all revolve around the same principle - further developing Aetherdale's second region, the Ice Caves. As a refresher (or maybe the first time I've put this in a dev log, even I can't remember now), the player will progress through differently themed regions of Aetherdale as part of each run, travelling between smaller maps in that region that are accessed by charging up a portal in the previous map. The first of these areas is a forest, which serves as a relatively low-challenge environment to kick off the run, refine your playstyle for that run, etc. And thus far I'm happy with where that much is at, development-wise.

    The problem occurs immediately after you take the final portal from the forest to the ice caves. Apart from some balancing issues that can be addressed later down the line, something is just missing. There's technically a new enemy type that shoots ice beams at you but I'm debating scrapping it because it just doesn't feel right in its current form. And other than that, there wasn't much difference, other than being in a relatively empty-feeling ice area instead of a forest. I've determined a few things that need to change - some of it is already done or in progress, and some of it will take longer.



Ice Caves Level Design Improvements

By far the biggest thing that needed to change was the way the Ice Caves "reads" - it felt far too empty. It also wasn't immediately clear why an entire underground region was built of ice, to the hypothetical audience or to me. I've begun to remedy both of these things.

After improvements

Before, for reference


The most obvious thing to change was the large "claws" of ice that are now scattered through these areas. These are visibly different (moreso in-game than in that screenshot) than the regular ice that's everywhere else - they have a mild glowing, shifty/parallaxy effect on them that speaks to a magical nature.

    The Ice Caves have lore now - this region was not originally made of ice, but a catastrophe destroyed the civilization that stood here and encased it in ice. How much of this will be discoverable in-game is to be determined, but the main thing is that I can now develop the Ice Caves informed of its history and what that may entail.



Silver Chests

The next thing that needed to change was the rewards available for exploring each level. The forest levels are littered with wooden, rusty chests that contain gold, healing orbs, trait tomes, and the occasional consumable. To go to the next, completely different region and only find more of the same chest isn't very fulfilling, so I pulled Silver Chests from the ever-growing backlog of things I want to add and made them real.




    Silver chests contain all of the things normal chests contain, but with more gold, more healing, and higher chances for an item. They will additionally be able to contain weapons, but the mechanism for picking those weapons up is broken at this moment so I can't call that part "done".

    Like the wooden chests, silver chests are ostensibly unlocked by a key, however without access to said keys, the best way to open them is just beating the crap out of them. And the silver chests make a nice metal clinking noise when you do.



New Weapon

I came to the realization that just giving statistically better Wraith weapons over time isn't going to cut it - they need to start packing a punch. Even better if they pack more and more punch each region. I'm currently working on a set of weapons that can only be found in the Ice Caves and onwards, each with some mechanic that sets them apart from the standard weapons of their class.

    The first is the Frostbreaker Crossbow. Originally used by explorers to break through the ice in this region, the Frostbreaker makes a great weapon for a Wraith, as well. Its bolts have cluster bombs strapped to their ends - creating a large explosion where it collides, which in turn creates several smaller explosions randomly around it. This is now my favorite weapon in Aetherdale. I may yet change its visuals but for now it's good enough that I'm moving on to the next weapon.







Thanks for following along. If you have feedback or anything else you'd like to see in these dev logs let me know, I could probably get more technical with them if there's interest in that. Otherwise see you in the June dev log.

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