(Posted originally on our blog)

Hi everyone!

It's been a while since our last devlog, if you read our latest blog post you know why, we had a ton of non-work-related issues that pretty much thrown our entire august month down the drain, we did little to none progress regarding the Medical area but on the upside, we did finish the Giant Oirbo room and fixed some issues.

Now since the beginning of the month, we finally went back to work we are finally back on track:

The decoration and world appeal are coming along nicely, the giant human pod towers are finally in and the right tower challenge is complete!

The right tower is more than a vista though, firstly if you go to this section before defeating the boss you won't be able to see the towers and you will activate the security measures for it XD. The security measures are 3 different challenges (on the 3 red rectangles in the image) where the player will need to prove mastery on all 3 main enemy mechanics of the level, meaning that if by some reason a player stumbles upon this section before she is ready, she will have a hard time getting past it.

As always we included a few other ways of the player to get to the southern sections of the area but those we will let the players find out XD.

Our design goal with this tower is to ensure that the player is ready for what comes next, not necessarily the rest of the medical area that the player can explore after this section, but ready for the mechanical area:

This is important to us as designers because we can expect a certain level of skill when the player reaches it, and not simply the usual basic control of the main mechanics of the game that has been our starting point for the Natural and Medical areas game design so far.

After the player defeats the medical area boss (the surgeon xD) she will be able to totally bypass the tower challenge if she wishes to do so by pressing the passive elevator button, that will disable all the tower challenges. The passive button is only activated when the player disables the security system after defeating the boss, so it won't be available if the players wander around this section before that.

The final consideration we had for this massive challenge was to make sure that it works on both directions (top->bottom | bottom->top) since we don't know where the player came from. Once again we have other passages that lead into the northern sections without passing through this one.

If you want to check out how this working in-game you can check one of our latest tweets where we show off the first challenge of the tower.

Just today we added one more detail to the Oirbo movement, we finally have a double jump animation:

And that is it for the current progress, this week we will finally start the area boss so expect some previews on the next devlog, and will also resume the biweekly schedule of devlogs that we've been maintaining for a while now!

A big thanks to all our patrons for supporting us, and other thanks to all Oirbo fans that keep sending us feedback! Don't forget to join us on  Discord, Twitter, and wishlist the Oirbo on  Steam, below the medical area progress as usual!