Hop onboard, as it's time for us to continue our Tour of Explora! Now that we've visited the underwater town of Sharkdwell and the furry settlement of Meowosville, we're heading towards a colourful, majestic swamp! Watch out where you land your ship. The swamp water can be hard to wash off!

This time, our stop is at Driplands, a place that is a town as much as an endless, rainbow swamp! 🌈 The lands around the town are covered in very colourful goop. You'll know you're there when you see a giant iron water faucet on the horizon! Even if you're travelling on your own, you can't miss it.

Put on your best raincoat, some tall boots, and let's meet the locals!

When the goo from the Pastel Falls merged with the Mossy Marsh, the first slimefolk were born! With time, they learned that the substance that gave them life had a lot of handy properties, like solidifying, medicine, jewellery, and more, and built their own town from it. To control the flow more properly, they built the Giant Faucet, placed right in the middle of their town. You'll find them to be a creative bunch. They have experts in art, fashion, cooking, and all sorts of creative works they make from slop.

More to the south, where the colour stops and the vegetation starts to become denser, one can find the Mossy Marsh! It takes some time to get used to the smell of nature, but just because it’s slimy doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its charm. Crocodiles, flies and even a frog playing a banjo are proud of calling it home. 

And if you’ve got a Pickaxe, you can help yourself to some minerals at the Boggy Quarry, where gold does grow on trees! Oh, and there's gems and artefacts to find too, but we didn't want to ruin the punchline. ⛏️

If you want to trade and do business at Driplands, you should go see Blubbie! As the owner of the rapidly growing goo fashion brand Bubbline, she's usually busy making new designs, but she'll make some time for you! Her Rainbow Necklace goes with anything, her Bath Bubbles are very relaxing, and if you're hungry, treat yourself to some Slopsagna!

But don't forget that she is a visionary! Blubbie's designs are rainproof and waterproof, yet it’s never enough! She's always looking for more ideas and inspiration to craft her art. ✨

The reputation of the Bubbline fashion brand didn't build overnight, and neither does yours! As with any other town, Blubbie is always on the lookout for people that would accept some quests and odd jobs from her, in exchange for money, rewards and, of course, Town Reputation!

Town Reputation is a special value for each town that tracks how much you've interacted with each town. From selling new items, to completing town quests, towns will track how much you've done for them. As you accumulate Town Reputation, you'll level up your Town Rank. Doing so, will unlock you new items, like cosmetics for your airship and extra upgrades, alongside even more quests. Later quests come with extra-valuable rewards such as Stardust, Super Water, and even more special resources we'll talk about later.

Town quests can also be repeated and will replenish over time! Unlike the story quests where you seek and fill the lost diary of Sir Reginald Sharkingston, these can be done multiple times for more reputation and rewards. You'll have a limited amount of town quests you can take at each time. As you increase your town rank, you'll also be able to take more town quests. Hurray for interconnected systems! ✨

At Driplands, Blubbie will often ask you to get materials for her designs. And if there is some demand, some slimefolk might want to hitch a ride to visit a tourist spot! Most importantly, since Blubbie herself rarely has any chance to leave her workshop, she is likely to request from you some photo shots of amazing places for inspiration! Grab a Camera from her inventory and go snap some photos! 📷

For this week's behind-the-scenes and with such a unique species of townsfolk, we've got to talk about how we go about creating the fantastical but believable characters that populate Explora! Very early in development of the jam version, we created Blubbie to showcase that this wouldn't just be a game about anthropomorphic animals. Rather, we wanted to show we could have all kinds of species if we wanted, even magical ones. However, we also wanted them to feel like they could coexist, while still having quirks that separated them from one another, to further differentiate their cultures.

Blubbie, for example, was originally created to parody the anime slime girl archetype. Throughout development, as we explored that slimefolk were mostly liquid that changed shape and form at will, we made her design more gooey and unique. For their world building, we also figured that this meant that slimes could be whatever shape, form and gender they wanted at any given time, appearing as they saw fit. There are other characters in Explora whose design also allows exploring how the characters approach their identities.

This approach also created a lot of fun challenges and domino effects that impacted the world. For example, like we've talked about in Sharkdwell, instead of creating anthropomorphic sharks that had legs and could walk on land, we designed sharkfolk to need mechanical legs to do so. Later down the line, there are more characters whose physical design or species allowed for more storytelling opportunities! We hope you get to meet them soon! 😊

If you've been keeping up with the posts we've been making, we've recently hosted a pets quest on our Discord Server[discord.gg]! 😺 Folks had chance to submit their pets, and we'd pick a few to adapt into the game. We've got a lot of submissions! These are some of the pets that folks submitted and made it in as part of a first batch. Don't they look cute? 🐶

We'll continue going through the submissions and picking some pets to add to the game as we carry on development. If you've missed participating in it and didn't submit your pet, you can share some photos of yours! We've got a brand new Discord Server channel for pets and friends, where pets are a part of the community all the time![discord.gg] 🐩

You can also be on the lookout for more Townseek activities! We know that not everyone has a pet, so we have more activities planned that will be more accessible for people who want to leave their impact in our game! 🌳

Now, dry yourself, since we're continuing the tour! Things got a bit too energetic with the fuzzy cats and the splashy slimefolk. Let's take it easy and visit the calm farm lands at Lawride Town next! It's just a rural town, so it should be a relaxing stop. What could possibly go wrong? 🍉

Have a rest, enjoy the voyage, and eat your veggies! We'll have plenty of them next time! Cheers! 👋

– Whales And Games 🐳