First, about the achievements’ look (at the moment):
After lots of rethinking and trial-and-error, achievement icons are planned to have this kind of style. These icons are drawn by the game on the fly, using an inner “script language”, almost the same I made for generating the terrain for levels. Staying close to the style of previous chapters’ amulets (which are now achievements), where I used some stone plates with shiny inlays, seemed a reasonable idea.
Achievements will be sorted into decks (you’ll have to collect all the achievements in a deck for some nice reward, and in order to “close” the deck and open the next one with new achievements waiting, see this previous post on achievements for more details), and I wanted to somehow show which achi belongs to which deck, hence the added frame, which will come in various colors depending on the deck.
I also wanted to give you a quick glance at how the upgrade path of talisman fragments (more on this topic here) looks and feels. Somewhat similar to how the enchantment system in Torchlight works (except the painfully annoying disenchantment, it won’t happen in GC2, at least not on purpose), you can spend shadow cores (GC2’s currency when outside battle) to upgrade a talisman fragment, which will result in either increased property values, or new properties added.
(Your talisman can host up to 15 fragments, all of their properties will sum up and give you enormous battle bonuses). So, a rather shy fragment can become quite powerful after several upgrades. How far you can boost a fragment depends on its rarity level. Common fragments (found early in the game) will have weaker properties and less upgrade levels, while late game rare fragments will give superior bonuses when maxed.
And finally, about vision fields… on these stages, you will get a fixed set of skills, spells and gem types (including, for example, disabling tower building), regardless of your actual wizard level and acquired abilities. So think of these stages as challenges that will test your true wizard wit (or youtube/forum dwelling skills) rather than how astronomical you got with endurance runs. 🙂 Story-wise, these stages will let you peek into past or future events… if you’re a GC veteran, these fields might look familiar. Please note, that they are (as well as the achis, talisman fragments and everything) heavily work in progress. There’s a plan to add wizard towers to pre-orb era (GC1, GC0) stages for example.
(GC1 epic3, GC0 #48, GCL G10)
Well, that’s the end of the blogflow for now, the next post will arrive no later than the 2nd of September.
There’s still a lot of tasks to do until release (finishing half-ready features, tons of bugs to fix, sound editing, illustrations, adding tutorials, playtesting, optimizing…), so we have busy months ahead.
Everyone have a great summer, see you in September, I hope I can bring you some great news!
