DLC Devlog #1 - Missions System

Hello everyone!

It's been quite a while since our last update! We've been working on our upcoming DLC for Fell Seal, very tentatively called "Missions and Monsters".

We've been quite busy hammering the designs down, and we've finally reached a point where we feel we have enough details to start our devlog on the creation process.

With each devlog, we'll be focusing on one of the new systems that Missions and Monsters will be adding to Fell Seal. This week, that's missions! But first, a quick refresher on the general scope of the DLC.

General Concept

Missions and Monsters isn't meant as a continuation of Fell Seal's story, but rather to extend and add to the core systems of the game, as well as add new challenges and content.

As such, the plan is to add a missions system, a guild upgrade system, recruitable monsters, a monster-taming system, monster classes, new encounters, new classes and new crafting recipes. We're also adding large encounters that will feature a lot more combatants on each side, for putting to work more of those units you've been collecting.

Missions

The new missions system is wide-reaching and meant to achieve several goals.

It will give more things to do for "benched units", with some missions giving special rewards, opening new content and being a viable method to procure many crafting components. Missions can also serve as an alternative means of earning EXP and AP for benched units, although in that case they tend to yield less impressive loot. Most missions will be repeatable, but some will be unique and award something quite special.

It'll be up to the player to decide which style of missions they want to focus on, as they can only run a limited amount of missions at once.

Missions (and upgrades, which we'll cover in a later devlog) are accessed through the Guild menu:

A new resource called Company Points (CP) will be added next to the current GP bar. Currently, CPs are only used to purchase Guild Upgrades, but we're considering adding a cost in CP to run Missions as well.

Once you've selected Missions from the Guild, you need to select the Region in which you want to start a mission. There are 5 Regions in the game and they open up as you unlock new nodes on the world map.

In this screenshot, only the "Centina Hinterlands" region is available and it's still missing 3 nodes to be fully unlocked. All missions have a location node where they take place, and thus won't be available until the given node has been explored by the player on the world map.

After selecting the region, the player can start a mission in that region.

Missions that aren't known yet (because they are locked behind a map node, or because they require a previous mission to be completed, for example) are shown as ??? in the list.

Missions can be in various states: new, in-progress, completed-and-done, completed-and-redoable. They have a different icon depending on their current state. In the example list, they are all "new" or unknown.

Here you can see the rewards of the mission as well as the required participants and how long they last (more info on that later!).

Selecting a valid mission will bring the player to a selection screen to decide which units to send on the mission. Only the units participating in the mission will earn the various rewards, such as AP, EXP, etc.

Story-characters can't be sent on missions and only recruits without an injury can be sent. When a unit is sent on a mission, they won't be available to be deployed in a regular battle map.

Each mission has a minimum and a maximum of participants and the first participant chosen becomes the leader of the mission. Once enough units are selected, the mission can be started.

Once the mission is started, it'll show as "in-progress" in the missions list.

In-progress missions have their own icon and are always sorted at the end of the list for a quick visual identification. Selecting a mission already in progress will allow the player to cancel it if they want to. Cancelling the mission will free up the units that were running it, but no rewards shall be given for the mission.

Currently, the maximum amount of missions that can be run at once is 3, although there is a way to increase that amount via the Guild Upgrades system.

When a mission is in progress, it will take some amount of time to complete, usually 30 mins, although that's something we're still tinkering with. After 30 mins of "real life time" has passed, the mission will be completed and display a result for the endeavor anywhere on the world map.

Mission success is not guaranteed, although the success rate will be tuned to be pretty high in general. There are multiple ways to increase that, including Guild Upgrades and carefully selecting the leader of the mission. The class of the leader will grant them a bonus success rate based on the mission. The description of the mission itself will have clues hinting at which type of class would do well on it. This bonus is only applied to the leader of the mission, to reduce the amount of micro-managing of classes that the player has to do for missions, while still providing some incentive for "thinking about it" rather than just clicking through things. Missions can also have a critical success result, in which case bonus rewards will be granted to the player.

The overall goal of the missions is to create another layer of interesting actions the player can take "outside of combat", with a wide array of goals possible, such as farming AP, EXP, GP or CP, as well as focusing on crafting materials, special rewards or unlocking new content.

It'll be tied to the Guild Upgrade system, which we should cover in our next devlog.

Feel free to send us comments, ideas, feedback and suggestions! (either by email through our website or on our Steam forums!)

Thanks everyone!