Planning the last additions to the Abandoned Archives level
I'm adding two little side areas: Slime Nest and Eye Nest. Here are the sketches for those:
The Eye Nest will be close to the start of the level, so easily accessible, but I will probably add a secondary exit to the overworld from the Slime Nest, so it will serve as another access point to the underground areas in general.
I have two lines of evolving monsters in the game right now, one slime themed and one eye themed. Normally you can encounter up to tier 3 versions of those monsters, but in these caves you will be able to fully upgrade them to the maximum 6th tier( maximum for these monsters, I might have higher tiers later on for others).
I'm still working out the details, but the idea is that you can bring a certain device to these caves which can extract genetic info left in the nests and synthesize higher tiers than normally possible. You will have to bring some combination of resources to that device in order to spawn each tier monster which then can be captured and you can repeat the process if you failed or want multiples of the same monster. This is probably going be the way you will be most easily able to catch evolving monsters in future levels too. At least for now these evolving monsters can go a couple tiers higher than any other monster, so they will be valuable for Cave Drone upgrades I mentioned in recent devlogs and I will probably add other rewards for fully evolving a monster.
The evolving device art is pretty much finished:
