Fantastic Pixel Castle Shares Development Milestones, New Concept Art, and First Possible Playtests

mmorpg.com:

Fantastic Pixel Castle has a new milestone devblog on the studio’s upcoming MMO, currently known as Ghost. In the blog, they take us along on their prototype development process and what the second milestone looks like for an early development game.

If you love getting a behind the scenes look and seeing how development progresses, then stay tuned. With more work, the gameplay loop consists of the Central Hub (currently nicknamed “The Ruins”, where parties of four or five get into various Blue Zones. In these dynamic zones, those groups will have to finish the objectives, find some treasure, and beat some bosses, and then return to The Ruins. From there, they go into a connected Red Zone to defeat a raid boss.

Yeah, they're talking about a raid boss, but everything is very early, still in the prototype phase, and that needs emphasis. They have “foundational gameplay” with melee, ranged, and heal all represented and playable in a rough early state, with basic rotations. FPC also added basic working inventory capabilities, items, and some objectives to complete. And bosses. “We also came up with lots of different kinds of monsters to fight, and boss battles. Hard boss battles.”

Since Blue Zones are a signature feature of the game, they detail work on different objectives, discoverable objects, and some quests. “Depending on the enemies a Blue Zone generates, you might want more healers, or more melee. You might want to build a bridge into a boss’s stronghold, or you might want to parachute in on top of the boss instead,” they say, detailing some design philosophy behind the feature. Upon Milestone 2, they have multiple (early!) working Blue Zones. Add this to the work the art and worldbuilding teams have been doing to create an extensive number of biome concepts, and Ghost is taking some more shape.

We even get a peek at one of the biome concepts, a lush tropical paradise looking place nicknamed The Manta Isles. To accompany this we also get some creature concept art