Khaldin Areas

Once the player reaches the end of the game, they unlock access to the post-game areas. The Khaldin Snowfields is the first area they enter, providing a nice, wide area to wander around in the snow. It also includes several required battles if you want to reach the rest of the post-game, making sure players are prepared for the trials ahead, as the enemies in these areas are a much higher level than anywhere else, and may pose a significant challenge to anyone that ignored all of the side quests.

Another callback area, this one shows what the Deep Woodland could look like if it was covered in snow. The stream splits the area up in several distinct sections, with a large clearing at the center. While the other woodland areas were focused on getting the player from one end to the other, this area only has one entrance, allowing it to focus more on being an actual forest with winding paths than a level.

Now this one interesting. And by that, I mean hard. Because of the way RPG Maker places tiles, I had to manually place almost every single tile here in order for it to not look terrible. And with it being a large, vertical level, that took a while. If the Forest Entrance represented maintained hiking trails, this one is meant to be just a sheer mountainside that you have to pick your way up with no clearly marked trails or anything.

This dungeon was based completely around the concept of a large, central ice floor that you have to slide around on to get between cave systems on the various sides. This idea itself took heavy inspiration from similar dungeons in the Etrian Odyssey game series, a large inspiration behind this game most notably felt here. Interestingly, once more the limited tileset of RPG Maker influenced the game; originally, the boss of the area was going to be an Ice Dragon, but since I couldn’t recolor the sprite outside of combat, I had to change it to a Fire Dragon.