So far, I've only really talked about battles/stat progression/story stuff; I’d like to talk for a bit about what happens more on the exploration side of things now. Specifically, I want to talk about field actions.

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass has a pretty strong emphasis on exploration. Since you’re looking through a kid’s perspective in this game, I wanted to make the world a big toy box for the player to have fun in (of course, this excludes the darker areas in the game, which I’ll share more about once I’m deeper into level design).

Since Jimmy can transform into several different monsters, this allowed me to give him several different field actions based on which monster he’s currently transformed into them. Think about them as the on-map abilities you gain in Breath of Fire 2 or the tools in Lufia 2. You can change into a different monster anywhere in the game, and by pressing a button (default: A), your monster will perform a field action.

For example: the Low-Level Goon is a bit of a troublemaker. His field action allows him to grab onto things and either SHAKE THEM UP or PUSH THEM AROUND. For example, you might shake a tree so that it drops its fruit to give you a quick HP recovery. Or, you might push or pull a block onto a switch. Or, you might shake a vending machine and get a free snack. Or, maybe you just want to shake somebody lounging on the beach because you don’t like his stupid face.

Another example: the Revolting Blob is universally hated, so you can use his field action to turn yourself into a target like so:



In most dungeons, this will allow you to immediately fight a random encounter, but maybe you’ll find other uses for it as you explore.

While I do have some puzzles in mind for field actions, most of these will be optional. The main goal with field actions was to give lots of room for players to interact and have fun with the environment. There are lots of transformations and each has its own field action, and I’m looking forward to profiling them in future blog posts!