early updates pt 2: the re-slummening (Patreon)

there's more!
...but not too much more, yet. i'll post another collected list later, but for today we'll just be showing a remade map. if you would rather just be pleasantly surprised when it comes to playing the game, maybe skip this post.

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...ok, we all wanna be here?

cool, hi. let's go.

so i mentioned streaming re-mapping the slums a bit in a very quick impromptu stream a few days ago, and i am contractually obligated under penalty of the forsaken abyss to post the outcome here. i'm cheating though-- becuase this isn't the part of the slums we re-did on stream, though it was shown, but rather the new, central part of them--

bbam:

i wanted to redo the slums for a few reasons. first, there's all the goals that i talked about before-- making the early game areas less linear, not just fighting the same trainers in a set winding corridor... also, literally nothing story-related actually happens in them? the player has no reason to go there besides being forced to pass through, so i wanted to make some room for a bit of that as well. finally, in the first place they were one of the earliest areas that i actually had an original vision for but i wasn't nearly able to live up to it with my mapping skills when i first started making the game. the above is much closer.

around the time that i was thinking about what i wanted to do with remaking the slums, i got a random DM from someone. they thanked me for making the game and told me they really enjoyed it! and that's great, i always love getting comments like that.
they then began to tell me about their fascination with dead malls. i believe that is a personality trait for them, in fact. it was a little surprising, and a little interesting, and then i moved on and went about my day.
and at around 2 am, as i innocently tried to sleep warm and cozy in my bed, i suddenly realized that most of what i had already wanted to do with the slums in the first place actually fit rather perfectly if the slums building were, say, a long-abandoned mall. 

suffice it to say i now consider myself an expert on specific niche knowledge about malls, their decline, and what can happen to them after their shut down. and i have used this knowledge as best i could above.

they are already fully finished/remade, but i'll wait to post some other details about the actual game part of them in the future after finishing a few more things.

thanks for hanging in there and give me the chance to do them a bit better justice <3