Refurbished the mining area
Hello everyone!
Work is proceeding smoothly!
I've finished retouching the 1st cavern/underground stage (the mines) with new decoration, loot, side areas and whatnot. It's looking much livelier now. I've also moved the entrance to these mines, from the 2nd hills stage (fae's) into the 1st hills stage (turquoise). If you look at the map of the island and how I distributed the locations, it made more intuitive sense to have the entrance be there.
Related to this, I've added a new small passage between the 2nd hill stage and the garden stage (also indicated in the map above). I will hide a few goodies inside this passageway, but the main purpose is to offer up more connections between some areas.
This new passage is blocked by some of the recently added breakable titles, which can only be broken by using the special skill "Ground Pound", and the other skill "Power Slash" can now also destroy these types of blocks. This way, even if players find this passage early, they won't be able to "sequence break" the game's flow because they will still need to acquire both skills from the respective bosses.
And here's some trivia relating to all of this: in my original design plans for the metroid-vania element of MKM, the stages were supposed to be much more inter-connected, with every stage having an underground version, that would connect stages is more ways.
For example, let's take the initial beach stages. It was supposed to have underground areas which were flooded with underwater sections, with more thematic enemies such as mermaids and giant fish. Then the beach would be connected via underground passages to the monster city (via a smugglers route) and to the deep underground (via the worm ways).
The same would go for the forest, hills, city, etc. The idea being that these sequence of tunnels and underground areas would all be interconnected and offer shortcuts between different stages and biomes.
Well, suffice to say that at some point along the development, I scrapped the idea entirely. Although some parts of that idea "survived". Of main note, the underground biomes, which begins from a mining area and branches into the crystal veins and the deep underground.
Another hint of this is the sewer section of the city stage, which now is just a small and quick section, was supposed to be a whole stage in its own right, as it would be the "smugglers route" I mentioned above, and it would be kind of an intentional meme too, seeing as sewer (or poison) areas tend to be a pain in the ass for players and are kind of infamous in video games.
The dungeon beneath the castle is also another surviving part of that original idea. All of those areas would lead into one another, reinforcing the idea of the metroid-vania. This is why I call MKM a "lite" version of that, because the overall island as it is now, is way smaller and more linear than what I originally planned.