ARISE by SpellBound

New Features:

Easter Isle (the school of fish target location) is now unlocked from the start of the game.

Technical Improvements:

Added dialogue narration in some missing places.
Performance improvements for low end devices.
Updated technical systems to newest versions.

Planned Improvements:

Treasure hunting system quality of life improvements.

New environments for The Shallows, The Wreck of the Flagship, and Octo-Outcrop.
Bug fixes.
Performance improvements.

Conversation Menu:
- A new menu allows the player to start a conversation with any character in the current scene.
- Alerts on this menu notify the player of the important conversations available to them.
- Helps the player navigate to characters hidden offscreen or behind obstacles.
The Art Studio (new minigame):
- A painting sandbox where players can paint and save custom paintings with an array of brushes, colors and stamps.
- Paintings can be saved and viewed in the player’s inventory.
- Paintings can be applied to special parts of the ocean, so the player can decorate and leave their mark on the virtual world.
Rips & Shreds (new minigame):
- A bullet hell style minigame accessed through the Clownfish Portal.
- Dodge rocks and shoot obstacles out of the way as you try to recover Clara’s missing jokebook pages!
The Open Ocean:
- Manual floor setting - Players can now set the floor height by lowering their device to floor.
- Grid content - As players walk around the open ocean, they will see their floor populate with plants, rocks, and sticks.
Digging & Treasure Hunting (new minigame):
- When walking around the Open Ocean, players will occasionally come across treasure maps. These maps will lead them to buried treasure, which they can dig up and open.
- cosmetic items can be received as rewards from chests.
Lock Picking (new minigame):
- Certain chests that players come across will be locked. These chests can be picked open using lock picks that they can purchase from Red Beard.
- Lock picks can be purchased from Red Beard’s treasures, a shop that he runs in his portal.
Bridge Battle (new minigame):
- A shooting gallery style minigame where players must defeat red beard to get him to surrender the bridge and grant them access to the remainder of the reef.
Weed Whacker:
- New visual effect for when the player takes damage.
The Captain’s Piano:
- The player can now play any song to complete Tammy’s “A Captain’s Piano” quest.
Minigame Chapters:
- Minigames with multiple levels are now organized into chapters. Each chapter has 3 levels that revolve around a game mechanic, quest requirement, or art style.
Activities System:
- Characters can now perform activities, which makes them move about the reef and perform animations instead of just sitting idly by their house.
Characters:
- All new illustrations for the characters & dialogue portraits.
Music System:
- Song players now play layered stems instead of a single AudioClip.
- Stems have volumes that change dynamically based on the global “Intensity” level, which can be used to make rich adaptive music experiences.
- A singleton AudioListener and persistent song players allows songs to cross-fade seamlessly between scenes.
Quest System:
- “Focused Quest” section of Quest scroll was removed.
- Each dialogue interaction has a “relevant quest” that becomes the focused quest whenever the interaction is played.
Camera / Photographs:
- Players now have a camera that they can use to take and store in-game snapshots.
- characters and items are “photographable,” allowing us to know if they are present within a photograph. We plan to use this system to make quests where the player has to take photographs of certain things.
The Reef:
- The “Reef Entrance” and “The Reef” now exist in the same scene.
- Every building has both a destroyed and fixed version.
- Olivia’s Garden has been added to the neighborhood to introduce the decorations system earlier.
Settings:
- Players can set the Reef Sky Camera sensitivity through a menu in the settings.
Graphics Enhancements:
- Grass Shader that allows for prettier, denser grass

**New Features**

- App Update modal - This will allow us to broadcast information about new releases to older versions of the app.
- Weed Whacker:
- Level Select Screen
- Replaced the tutorial with “Training Day”
- “Overgrown Grove” - Basic Level
- “The Corrupted Caves” (with a new quest) - Sunset level with more rocks and shield mechanic.
- “The Poisoned Port” (with a new quest) - Night time level with bioluminescent plankton effect.
- Shock Shaker:
- Swiping now requires aiming, as you can send electric balls flying left and right!
- Level Select Screen
- AAA Batteries - No movement
- AA Batteries - Near movement
- C Batteries - Near and middle movement
- D Batteries - Near, middle, and far movement
- 12V Double Trouble - Near, middle, and far movement with 2 Eels!
- Bait ‘n Breakfast:
- Level Select Screen
- Level 1 - No directional swipes
- Level 2 - Directional swipes
- Level 3 - Directional Swipes with hazards!
- Level 4 - Directional Swipes (minimum 3 health) with hazards!
- Level 5 - Waffles everywhere!
- New Minigame! Maze Mayhem:
- 9 Levels: one for each fish found in the portals
- Tilt your phone to move around the maze and try to catch all of the fish
- Non-AR versions of portal locations:
- Previously, exiting a minigame would take you to the open ocean. This hindered the ability to talk to a character after satisfying a minigame related requirement. Now, leaving brings you directly to the character you’re supposed to talk to.
- Quests have been split up into smaller chunks so that there are less instances of long walls of ??? requirements.
- Journal Enhancements:
- The Journal is now a properly animated book with physical pages.
- Minigames now have a section in the journal so you can track level & star progress from anywhere.
- Character entries now have flavor-text for Species, Gender, Age, Birthday, and Hometown.
- Reef Enhancements:
- Many buildings modeled to have proper destroyed versions instead of simple gray foundations. (Hermy’s House, Olivia’s House, Electro’s House, Shaina’s Barn, Victor’s Castle, Clara’s House, The School, Luigi’s House, Tammy’s House)
- Tammy’s Stage has been moved across the bridge, and she now has a house.
- Luigi now has a house.
- Neighborhood road, broken/fixed fences, overlook is now paved with wall & binoculars.
- Some dialogue lines are now delivered with pictures next to the text, to help illustrate what a character is talking about.
- Graphics Enhancements:
- Our new Toon shader allows for brighter colors, higher saturation, casting and receiving shadows, and fog effects.

**Techincal Improvements**

- Now leveraging remote configuration so we can load in mixpanel & backend links at runtime. This will allow us to change them without breaking previous versions.

**Planned Improvements for the future**

- More enhancements to The Reef (More destroyed buildings, better decorations/environment)
- More minigames, likely replacing the scavenger hunt tasks.
- A new AR minigame that encourages walking
- More player guidance features for player autonomy
- Rewrite the storyline to make the goal of the game more intuitive
- Zoom in on things introduced for the first time (Scavenger hunt items, minigame entrances)
- Add in more pictures to allow for easier understanding of gameplay from all ages and reading comprehension levels

Bug fixes and backend improvements.

The SpellBound team’s main focuses for v.15 are streamlining and flexibility— streamlined setup and gameplay so your patients can start playing quicker and keep playing longer, and increased flexibility in gameplay so more patient populations will be able to benefit from ARISE in their treatment plans. Let’s take a look at some key changes we made:

We re-imagined and re-designed the Reef experience.
After over a year of testing, feedback, and problem-solving, we have re-imagined the Reef to be a “home base” within the game instead of the previous paper mat. This non-AR home base is accessible through a button in the main screen that switches between “the Reef” and “the Ocean”.

We added key in-app tutorials.
To avoid confusion and reduce the need for excessive adult supervision, we have added a few key tutorials at certain parts of the game to teach players how to navigate and interact in the game.

We restructured quests to increase player agency.
During playtesting, we noticed that some kids really loved to connect with the undersea characters, while other kids loved to complete quests, and some kids would play the minigames all day if they could. In this version, we restructured quests to allow for either story-first play or movement-first play. The best of both worlds!

As always, we want to thank all of our customers, partners, and playtesters for helping us make
ARISE the best game it can be!

Thank you!

The Captain's Piano has been added! This is a fun piano minigame located at the Wreck of the Flagship.
Vuforia has been removed from the app to boost performance.
Game data is now loaded on change and saved on request. This makes loading speeds faster, and stops progress from being lost if the app crashes.

Bug fixes

Fixed app description, added video for iPad 3rd gen.