Joon Shining
Fixed level6-7 bug, and other general updates
• world 6: in the proc gen system we replaced the hard-to-use magnets with much easier-to-use grapples
• changed a few of the later droplets in world1 to purple-types
Made some gold-times more achievable. Improved underwater camera
• Fixed the camera in world 2 – so if you are below the surface of the water, but close to it, the camera corrects downwards, so the water-surface doesn't obscure your view of the ball
All Achievements Are In!
Fixed World 8 locked-controls bug
All droplets are in!
Happy hunting!
Updated the hero, Joon
World 4 (Cave World) Gameplay Polish - Eased off the Difficulty Ramp
Following the world 2 polish last month we've given a lot of attention to world 4, the cave world. This is a favourite of ours, and some really interesting gameplay mechanics and level designs come into play here. However because building these levels is a lot more time consuming (the cave levels are both vertical and horizontal, whereas most other worlds are primarily horizontal) we didn't polish the difficulty as much as the other worlds.
Replaying this world again I don't know how I managed to get gold on all these levels, so it was good to get some perspective and realize the bar was set crazily high!
So as with world 2 these levels are still an awesome challenge, but now gold is much more achievable for the experienced player.
We also gated world 4 in the overworld so you now need 10 droplets to enter. This is just to get you in the rhythm of collecting droplets before you hit the last few worlds where a large number is needed to enter.
We hope you're enjoying Mage Drops!
As always come and join us on Discord, we'd love to hear about your experiences:
https://discord.gg/zHXDg65Gr8
World 2 (Ocean world) Gameplay Polish - Eased off the difficulty ramp
We're starting to go back over the core levels and deal with some of the difficulty issues. World 2 and 4 were definitely at the top of our list!
For today we've done a thorough pass on World 2:
• reduced the drag and increased the gravity when underwater. Overall this makes the underwater movement a little faster, and allows you to hit further. This means there's more scope to adjust your shot in the air, and to roll further on the ground
• added in some support-structures to allow for this slightly altered underwater physics
• changed up the arrow-bubbles for underwater. This was a tricky one. Essentially the old arrow bubbles (the both the auto ones and the ones you can manually rotate) took into account your current velocity while you're inside the bubble. So even though these bubbles shoot you out quite quickly, you could get wildly different results depending on whether you were falling, moving upwards, sideways, etc. This made accuracy/consistency extremely difficult. So instead we replaced them (just the ones in this world) with zipper-bubbles, which cancel out any previous velocity you had, so they reliably shoot you exactly in the direction they're pointing
• made the water a little more transparent
• added in a powerup that gives you temporary slow-motion. This is mainly for transitioning from above to below the water-surface, where the slow-motion gives you more time to react to what you couldn't see from above the surface
• generally tweaked the pars and time-targets to make getting golds more fair in all the world 2 levels
Tutorial Tweak
Content Update: Added "Boss Fight Puzzles" in multiple worlds
While all the core-gameplay levels are complete since December 2021, we're now working on a few unique levels that will tie in with the story (which is also coming soon)
These unique levels help to give the game a sawtooth-wave kind of shape, where the difficulty ramps up as the levels progress, then peaks at a boss-confrontation, then drops down again at the start of the next world, and so on.
While Mage Drops, and Orchid of Redemption as a whole, has a non-violent philosophy, our story still has important conflicts for our hero to overcome.
Our solution to this is to create boss-fight-puzzles where, instead of trying to kill some enemy, you're confronted with a larger scale puzzle to unravel, in the midst of trying to dynamically evade danger.
For those who have already progressed far through the game but want to go back and try these levels out, they'll already be accessible from the Course Select screen as the last level in their respective worlds.
The boss fight puzzles added in this build are:
• Arogana – World 3-13
• Jenola – World 4-13
• Ex Machina – World 5-13
• Eris – World 6-13
Let us know how you go, we'd love to hear about your experiences!