Design Review Poll for Castle Design and Miriam's Room

The Rogue-like Mode (with randomized layouts) is a completely separate from the main game. That will have a static, planned-out, intentionally designed castle.

Somebody should hire Astaroth for the design team. So many of her ideas are great. With the amount of insight and technical knowledge the brings with the posts, I can't imagine she's not already working in the industry somehow lol

i wish, never managed to get hired on because im neither a programmer or a badass artist, and many gaming companies look for those first (plus i got out of college right as the economy crashed, grr >.<), did try my hand at creating a mobile game company with an author but that never got off the ground cause you can only get so far without a programmer, im just someone who has a degree in game design and has played a shitton of games all my life, would be pretty epic to get to work with iga though ;>.>

Thanks for filling me in.

Add the animation thread's ideas to it. "Death animations and other types of animations"

Glad a lot of people are picking interaction with the background. While it might need further explanation to Artplay as to what it actually means, any added form of interaction that makes the environment even more of a character is a good idea.

Now if only some of the cooler stage ideas got higher up in the polls.

while I would love to have areas similar to symphony of the night,I still would like to have many areas that are fresh new experiences,I don't wanna be exactly playing symphony of the night 2 and treading the same castle over,I just hear us talking about a lot of the same areas we have seen already and would like to see some new fresh ideas like...hm,Maybe a tower of ghosts and Owls and haunting visions,or you know what would be cool?A bloody hospital with demon nurses and mad doctors and of course some ill-fated patients that could not save

I think the main thing I'd like the devs to take away from this thread isn't just the levels in the polls, but more the posts being made. I absolutely think the best thing to keep in mind would be connecting level ideas together (mixing an underground waterway with the basement and add in a wine cellar in a room or two, or mixing an observatory with the library), and having interactive elements in the levels.

On the topic of level design, one poll idea I feel is underappreciated is the "unique rooms" option. There's one area in the Arena of AoS where you ascend, and it gets reused for the Chaotic Realm except in reverse, so the focus is on descending. It has an amazing twisting layout that really forces you to think about which Souls to use going through it on both occasions because of how you're made to approach it each time. The enemy placement is really great and surprising as well, which only adds to it. I think it's integral to have stellar enemy placement combined with unorthodox level layout, especially later in the game. There's a bit in OoE (about 22:30 here) where you get a couple of Tin Men thrown at you in a very tight space so it's tough to avoid them, and trying to fight against them is rough because of the way the tables are placed. You're also required to go through it to progress, and it's before you get the Volaticus glyph so you can't just cheese it with Torpor. There's clearly a lot of thought put into this very simple area. Additionally, it's tough going back through this room because of the gauntlet of enemies standing between you and the Cerberus glyph afterward. As a final note, I feel like OoE balanced potion cost vs potency really well, so this area feels like a trial both against a bunch of strong enemies and your wallet. I really want Bloodstained to have a bunch of rooms like the two I mentioned, but they should be used somewhat sparingly until the late game so the difficulty doesn't get crushing.

While looking up other things, I came across this in the Ask IGA AMA: