Welcome to the Gear Shrine Depths, the final area of Paper Animal Adventure!
You will be able to access the area after completing all seven other areas. The Gear Shrine Depths area is a bit special, since it features a special map generation algorithm that creates these large carpets with tall pillars next to them!
I tried adding a sense of height to the whole thing to give the player the feeling of being in a tall, ancient hall, so I not only added the tall pillars, but also waterfalls that flow down from the top. The higher these objects reach, the less opaque they get, to not obstruct the view!
Additionally, the area has a darkness effect, with various light sources, like the torches, the player itself and some enemies (in this case, the Anglerfish enemy).
There are also various objects that hang from the ceiling, like old, rusty chains or this chandelier!
There are also some red and blue swords and shields laying around, what's up with that?
So far I was able to add two enemies to this area, one of them being the Gazing Gear enemy. Like all Gazing enemies, it attacks with spikes that shoot upwards. But a short time after the spikes appeared, they will move sideways and attack a second time, so better take care!
Challenges💪
One of the Kickstarter stretch goals was the Challenge Mode!
The Challenge mode provides a fresh experience, where you have to reach a certain goal with modified game settings. There will be a total of 52 challenges, with two boss rush challenges.
When you completed a challenge, you will get the Cleared Tropy. If you got a good score, you'll get the Score Trophy and if you completed the challenge pretty fast, you'll get the Time Trophy!
So lots of stuff to do!
Currently I'm done with challenge #1 - #21 and I already think they are super fun haha
Challenge #8 makes you play as Chunky Plant, who has decided to expand her domain and advance into the Shiny Caves area!
When you want to play a relaxed round, try Challenge #12! Here every Growth upgrade costs only 1 Experience Point!
In Challenge #18 you can't attack directly by yourself. You have to spawn a bunch of BuddyBots that will do the attacking for you!
When attempting to do Challenge #21, you have to defeat Pew Pew in under 6 minutes dungeon time. You lost when all your characters are defeated or when the timer runs out, so you better hurry up!
Supply Sets🍰
I wanted to make starting new runs a bit more interesting, so I added Supply Sets! You can unlock Supply Set A, B and C and can chose one in the Character Select screen!
Supply sets have different Items, Skills, Stickers or other stuff. When you select a Supply Set, you'll start with its contents in your inventory. The Supply Set contents change daily, so I might be worth checking them out from time to time!
You don't have to chose one of course:)
Also to make things fair, they are disabled in the Tournament and Challenges mode!
New Domain Skill🏠
The Domain skill got reworked a bit!
Before you could only cast a Domain where it didn't overlap with any other Domains, but now you can stack them together!
When you expand your Domain by casting another one nearby, the time until it disappears again gets extended! You can see how much time the Domain has still left by its color:
White means you have more than 10 seconds left, then comes green, orange, yellow and red means it's about to disappear.
Also the bigger your Domain is, the more bonus stats you'll get!
A small Domain only sparkles a bit, but a bigger one sparkles way more, indicating it giving you more bonus stats while you're in it!
Area Entrances🌳
I also changed the way you can enter areas now!
When an area was generated, one floor was chosen to have an entrance to another area.
That meant if you wanted to go to a specific area, you had to take a specific route, which didn't leave you with much routing choices.
For example if you wanted to go to the Kaboom Dunes in the screenshot above, you would have to take the bottom route and didn't have the choice to visit any other floors.
So now these area entrances act like a shortcut, because when you defeat a boss, you can now choose where you want to go!
As soon as you enter the portal you can choose between the Gear Shrine or the other areas. This means you can plan your route on the World Map more free.
Thanks for reading🧡
That's it for today friends!
Thank you so much for reading this far:)
As always, if you have any feedback, suggestions or questions feel free to reach out, I'm always happy to hear them!!
Hope you'll have an great November, take care of yourself and others and see you in 4 weeks!!:D🧡
Development Update #03
New Character Select Screen🐣
The game and its features grew historically and not everything was planned out right from the beginning and the old Character Select screen definitely showed that. It was cute, but it was also overloaded with info and felt bloated, but at the same time it didn't show all the necessary info😅
So I made a new one!:)
You can again scroll through all characters and choose the one that you like (surprise). Each character now also has a small description, so that new players also know what the playstyle of each character is and where their strengths and weaknesses are. It also tries to highlight the most prominent feature of each character.
When you press the "Run / Extra"-button, in this case the Alpha 3 key, it opens the Status Menu from in-game!
Here you can take a look at a character in detail. You can see their stats, status effects, their starting skill, their passive and their current level as well as the corresponding unlocked stat upgrades.
When you select a character and you unlocked their B-skin a small selection shows up where you can choose which skin you would like to play with!
Levels💪
As you might have noticed, the Character Select screen now also shows a level for each character. I added a Level system this month, to add some more meta progression to the game!
Each level up unlocks permanent stat upgrades for the character. Here are the stat upgrades for Peep for example:
The maximum level for each character is 10! To keep things balanced I made each character a bit weaker again, but if you reach Level 7 every character is as good as before the new Level system. Level 8, 9 and 10 make their stats even better than before!
You can level up characters by playing with them. When you lose only the last character gets Level Points (points you need to reach higher levels), but when you reach the Gear Shrine and seal a timeline every character in your team gets Level Points!
You can see how many Level Points your characters got in the Results screen:)
How many Level Points you get depends on the Score you get at the end of your runs. The Score basically increases with how good you play, how much you explore and how many quests you complete💪
BrokenBot🤖
The BrokenBot is the second NPC in the Vector Space area!
When you interact with it, it will help you to find some beans, just like the BeanBot in the Flat Flat Plains area. The problem is, well, it's broken.
This means it will cast Pyroblast from time to time or throws wrenches, that will hurt you if they hit you!
The signals it gives you on where to find the beans are also a bit complicated...
There are three different types of signal it gives, each with a 33% chance:
Rubbish - It will just display any random emote
Green arrow - The green arrows show in the direction of the hidden bean
Red arrow - The red arrows show in the opposite direction of the hidden bean
If you know how to work with it it's definitely a good thing, but it might take some time at first haha
Laika🐕
Laika is the third NPC of the Vector Space. She is trapped inside her broken spaceship and she needs your help to get out!
She gives to the correct order of the symbols you have to activate to get her out, but the rest is on you!
If you help her she also gives you a small reward:)
New Character Passives✨
A few characters also had kinda boring or bad Passives, so I decided to rework a few.
The first one is from Kwak! Kwak's new Passive Knowledge makes it so that they get one free Growth Upgrade each time they visit a Camp Floor.
Kwak also can choose from 4 growth choices instead of the standard 3. This passive is especially later super strong, when all Growth Upgrades become super expensive.
The sticker Everyone is Kwak is basically doing the same, but for everyone!
Fish's new passive is called Pew. Fish now uses the Pew skill instead of the default Tackle skill. This makes him feel a bit more like in Nuclear Throne:)
Pew is basically a fusion between Tackle and Windblade. He shoots a small projectile that travels a few tiles and hits the first enemy in its line. Stickers like Cool Tackle, Long Tackle or Buff Tackle also change how the Pew projectile behaves.
Everyone is Fish makes everyone shooting projectiles instead of using Tackle!
Gus also got a new passive, called Unfazed. His old passive was way too weak and his new one is super strong💪 Gus now takes only 1 damage from each source, which makes him especially viable for the late game, where enemy attacks normally deal a huge amount of damage.
Gus now can't upgrade his HP anymore though! He can have the maximum HP of 4, but that's it. Poison is also super effective against him, since Poison deals 1 damage multiple times.
And Gobble's immunity now changes depending on the area you're in!
She has a 50% chance to change her immunity to the element that is the most common in the current area, which means she doesn't take any damage from that element. In the other 50% of cases she changes her immunity to a random element, which is either Fire, Water, Plant, Electro, Aero or Ice.
The rings on her tail also change their appearance based on what immunity she currently has!
New Items🍄
Most areas have a specific Item that you can only get in that area, and the Cosmos Fruit is that Item for the Vector Space area!
If you eat the Cosmos Fruit, you can eat more Items than otherwise! It raises your Stomach Size for one Camp. You can also use multiple together and then inhale your whole inventory at once haha
If you cook it together with a bean, you'll get a Dark Brown Bean that raises your maximum Stomach Size permanently!
I also added another Item that Pokémon Mystery Dungeon fans might now: A Reviser Seed!
When you have an Reviser Seed in your inventory instead of a Reviver Seed your character gets shortly revived and you will see this message:
Then the character gets defeated again though.
If you take a close look at your inventory you can easily spot the difference though! The Reviser Seed is also called Reviser Seed instead of being disguised as a normal Reviver Seed. It also has a brighter color than the Reviver Seed.
Also it isn't completely useless! If you cook it with any other Item you'll get the Trial Stew!
The Poison might be annoying, but you'll get some really good status effects, too! The Trial Stew can be used well by Rebel for example, since it has only 1 HP anyway, so the Poison won't affect it
Vector Space World Map Dioramas📡
Every area has its little dioramas for the World Map, so here is a screenshot of the Vector Space area on the World Map:D
And here's one example zoomed out:
Thanks for reading🧡
That's it for this month friends, thank you so much for reading that far!!:)
Hope you all liked the new content and changes🥰
Take care of yourself and others and see you next month!!:)🧡
Development Update #02
Weather🌈
We now have weather in the game! When you enter a dungeon floor, there is a chance for a special weather type to appear, with each weather type having their own aesthetic and properties.
When you enter a dungeon floor there will be now a short intro that shows the current weather with its effects (and the theme that is playing).
Each area has also their own weather properties, which means that not all weather types can appear in all areas and some weather types appear more often than others in some places.
The Flat Flat Plains area for example can have clear weather, a heatwave, rainy weather or foggy weather. Clear weather has a 66% chance of appearing, while the heatwave one has 20% chance and the others have a 7% chance.
Here are all possible weather types:
Mild / Clear
Heatwave
Rainy
Foggy
Hail
Sandstorm
Eclipsed
You can see which weather a Dungeon Floor has on the World Map too! This makes choosing between different paths a bit more interesting:)
Basically it all comes down to your prefered playstyle! Some elements are stronger with their corresponding weather. The heatwave makes fire attacks stronger, while a rainy weather strengthens water attacks.
My favorite weather is eclipsed (definitely not inspired by Lethal Company (definitely definitely))! Eclipsed makes for a greater challenge, since there are more enemies and they all have stronger stats, but this also means there's more Experience Points to get!
I also think the effect looks cool haha
Eclipsed also has another secret for you: The Gazing Gem enemy will appear! The Gazing Gem enemy grants 15 Experience Points / Buttons (30 with its Rewind version).
It is quite difficult to fight though! It will spawn a lot of spikes and it also tends to flee the fight. So you better be prepared for this one! A good strategy is to attack it from a distance with continuous, small attacks (the Windblade for example) since it always takes only 1 damage per attack. This way it gets stun-locked and can't escape and you'll get those yummy Experience Points and Buttons!:)
Mouthman👄
The Mouthman is the third enemy of the Vector Space area!
It looks big and scary - but actually, it is big and scary! Wait...
He'll try to trap you in with a few buddies he spawns, similarly to the Spolem from the Thunder Peaks area. His buddies will also disappear, but after a much longer time. To speed up that process you can simply attack them, they all have only 1 HP, to get out quicker of your cage!
He also uses a giant bite attack, which can be a dangerous combination with his buddies. It's important to always have enough space around him to dodge his attacks, so try to not get caged in by his friends!
Angry UFO🛸
Here is the boss from the Vector Space area: The Angry UFO! It is, indeed, very angry.
It specializes in utilizing space mines, shooting lasers, debuffs and zooming around the map.
The space mines can be a difficult threat, especially when it spawns more and more. When you get close to them, you have about 1.2 seconds to get yourself in a safe zone - then they will explode in a diamond-shaped pattern.
It's absolutely vital to take care of all the space mines in advance by stepping near them when you have a bit of time! Otherwise they will explode in critical situations where you're trying to dodge the other attacks from the boss.
The Angry UFO is also the first enemy in the game that uses level 2 debuffs: Decouraga, Deprotectga, Slowga and Restrainga. You'll get those debuffs for 12 seconds for every hit you take from the debuff wave.
It's also very beneficial for this fight to have a character with a high Vigilance stat or to have a character you can switch to that tanks all debuffs😅 Or of course a character that can neutralize those debuffs.
Having level 2 debuffs is no fun! Your damage gets reduced by 40% (but by a minimum of 2), your defense too, your Gear Generation also gets reduced by 40% and the most dangerous aspect: Your movement speed is reduced by 40%! This makes dodging things really difficult.
Gear Shrine💡
As soon as you defeat the Angry UFO, you'll get to the Gear Shrine, as usual. The Gear Shrine now has 7 objects around the Magical Gear instead of 8, since the last area will be in the Gear Shrine itself, namely the Gear Shrine Depths.
Vector Space isn't finished yet, but I'm super much looking forward to creating the Gear Shrine Depths, I already have a cool ideas for them:)
I also added a small animation to the Magical Gear!
The gear will start spinning around faster the more areas you have cleared. In this example I completed 5 out of the 7 pre-Gear-Shrine-Depths-areas:D
(Though this scenario shown is usually not possible, since you can't complete the Vector Space without having completed the Thunder Peaks and Toy Box Tangle area first)
Very Angry UFO🛸💢
Like every other boss, the Angry UFO also has a Rewind version: The Very Angry UFO!
This fight gets chaotic quick! The range of the area of effect of the debuffs got increased and it spawns much more Space Mines!
The tactic is the same as the one for the Angry Ufo, but you have to react quicker and plan ahead better!
Jacob, the meteor researcher🌠
Remember the pinguin from the first picture from this update? It's Jacob, the meteor researcher!
Jacob is a NPC in the Vector Space area and he needs your help! He needs to activate two satellites that are far apart from each other, but as soon as the first one gets activated, meteors will show up!
As soon as you started the quest, run to the second satellite! It's wise to defeat all enemies before accepting his quest, otherwise things will get quite difficult...
Touch the second satellite to activate it, then the meteor shower will stop again. And then return to Jacob to get your reward!
Thanks for reading🧡
Thanks for reading this far! That's it for this month friends:)
I already have a few more cool ideas for stuff to add and I'm looking to finish the Vector Space area (finally) next month.
Have an amazing September, take care of yourself and others and see you next month!!:D🧡
Development Update #01
Hey friends,
I finally decided to post development updates of the game on Steam too!:D
The development is progressing well, and I think it would be super cool if you guys could see what's going on behind the scenes and what content I'm working on:)
I'll try posting the updates on the last Friday of every month!
The name change🐣
First of all, I have to announce something quite important!
As some of you might have already noticed, the name of the project was changed on the Discord and on the Steam page to Paper Animal Adventure. I have thought about it already for some months if it would make sense to change the name and came to the conclusion that it does. The game only has some loose RPG elements, even though it had the big RPG in its title and I don’t want to mislead players into buying the game when they think it’s heavily focused on RPG elements when it’s more a roguelike with only a few RPG things sprinkled here and there:)
It kinda hurts me to go away from the old name but I definitely think that re-naming it to Paper Animal Adventure is the best for the game, especially when I don’t want to disappoint players if they find out the game is not as focused on the RPG genre as they thought.
Camp Customization⛺
You can now fully customize your Camp!
I went all in and tried giving you as many customization settings as possible. When you open the Customization menu you are greeted with this screen:
Here you can choose between
Style: Change the style of individual camp parts, like a different ground texture, a different water type, the table in the background and even the background music!
Ground: Raise or lower tiles, create ways, water or even a void beneath you!
Objects: Place your favourite objects from all the different world from Paper Animal RPG in your camp or move old ones. You can of course delete some too!
Each sub-menu is packed with various options, here for example you can see all the different options for the Customize > Style > Ground menu:
In that screenshot the ground style is set to the Thunder Peaks area, the water type is ice and the table style is also set to the Thunder Peaks area table. The music is set to the Kaboom Dunes area (you can't hear it in this screenshot though lol).
When playing around with the Ground menu itself you can also do some cool stuff! For example when you combine water andvoid tiles you can get a nice waterfall effect.
You can of course also combine normal ground tiles and water tiles with a different height for a cute little waterfall like here:
If you raise a water tile that is among other water tiles you can make a small fountain, too!
So you see, there's lots of stuff for you to play around with😊
If we go to the Objects menu we can place tons of objects we already saw in the game!
Some objects also have a bunch of variations, like different the different colored Shiny Caves crystals.
Just select the Crystal and then cycle through the different variations with the "Run"-button (in my case the 3 key lol)!
Also when you want to visit your camp and change it a bit but don't want to play a whole run - worry not! I added the option to the Main Menu to directly visit your camp🥰
Camp Sharing🌍
So let's say you've made your perfect camp and you would love to show it to the world - but, how? Well, let's just say I came up with a cool idea for that😎
When you're happy with how your camp looks, you can select the Upload option in the Camp menu to upload your camp for other players to see:D
Your camp then gets uploaded into a database with all the camps from other players. When you play a normal run and you've enabled online stuff, there's a 50% chance to stumble into camps made from other players!
You can then take a look around and see which ideas they came up with and how they decorated their camp.
This way other players can also visit your camp (only if you decided to upload it though, you don't have to if you don't want to!).
When you leave their camp again you can give their camp either a Like, a Dislike, a Report or no rating at all.
Revamped Camp Menu🧡
I also spent a lot of time on re-working the camp menu system.
You can directly open every sub-menu from this menu from now on:
This gives you the option to quickly navigate between menus to not lose too much time during your runs.
I also added another option if you prefer a more life-like approach to the menus!:)
There are various objects you can place in your menu that then act as a menu. For example you can place a picnic basket and when you interact with it, the Items menu opens!
This way the player can choose if they want to either navigate the menus quickly or if they prefer a more immersive option.
Here you can see most of the interactive objects:
The Picnic Basket opens the Items menu
The Workbench opens the Skills menu
The Sticker Book opens the Stickers menu
The Weight Training Bench opens the Growth menu
The Bulletin Board opens the Status menu
The Cookpot opens the Cookpot menu
The Egg opens the Egg menu
The Mailbox opens the Mailbox menu
The Sign opens the Advance menu
Another advantage of having these two methods is that you can omit a function object out of your camp without losing the access to its menu! You can leave out the Picnic Basket if you don't like it, but you can still open the Items menu from the Camp menu.
Furthermore if you visit a camp from another player and get lost or can't find a function object you're looking for you can also just open the Camp menu and open the sub-menu from there:)
Thanks for reading🧡
That's it for today friends, thanks a bunch for reading this far!!
Hope you guys are looking as much forward to creating your own personalized camp as I'm looking forward to seeing them🚀🧡
Hope you all will have an amazing August!!
Take care of yourself and others and see you at the end of next month!:D🧡
