Today it was my turn to start working on the Housing part of Secrets of Grindea! Teddy has been working on it already, making a prototype of the system which he used to build this fabulous scene.

We started off with a few questions that needed answers: how would you get access to the house? How would you access the edit-mode? What measurements and guidelines are needed to make sure the furniture fit within the system? What categories of furniture do we need, and what should the menu look like?

If you know Swedish, you'll be able to read what we decided here (with the exception of how to get access to the house - that's for you to figure out within the game!):



Basically, after entering your house, you'll have to click a certain button to access the menu which lets you edit what furniture is on display and where you want to place it. The menu that appears will have 10 categories (so far):

The "hand" tool
which lets you move things around without placing new items.

Floors
Lets you choose which type of floor you want in your house

Wallpapers
Let's you choose what the walls look like

Chairs
Places where you'd be able to sit (if only your character could..!)

Tables (& other surfaces)
Basically furniture which lets you place other items on top of them, if you'd like.

Carpets
Some decorations for the floor :)

"Big furniture"
Will be things like bookcases, fireplaces, beds, big/tall shelves etc.

Wall decorations
Windows, paintings, small shelves that hang on the wall, etc!

Tiny decorations
Stuff you can place on other things (if you like), such as plants, tablecloths, plates, books..

Special Items
Items which do something cool. Like a jukebox which lets you choose what type of music plays in your house, or something that changes the lighting of the house. These items will probably also appear in the other categories, but we thought it'd be nice for them to have a separate category as well.

Actually, here's a quick sketch of what the housing menu will look like:


You can select which category you want to explore in the top right. Once you've made your selection, the items you own will appear in the window below. We decided that if you want to put 5 chairs of the same type into your house, you'll actually need to own 5 copies of that chair, so it feels like you actually own pieces of furniture rather than the right to put out an unlimited amount of that type of furniture into your house.

When adding furniture to your house, you'll be able to use four different buttons that do different things: one that puts your selected piece of furniture into the spot you've chosen, one that brings you back to the menu to select another item, one that lets you rotate the piece of furniture you're putting out (or any item you're hovering over), and one that lets you delete items you've already put out when you hover over them. In order to help you remember, there will be icons (or text) at the bottom of your screen, illustrating which button does what.

Well.. I think that's all for now! Please let us know what you think & leave your suggestions in the comments :)

Time for me to start making the actual graphics for those things, so that Teddy will be able to implement this housing system sooner rather than later!
Bikke is the guy next to one of the stairs in the Collector's HQ, and now it's time to remake his portrait!

Bikke inside the Collector's HQ

His old portrait

WIP of the new portrait!
 After I finished the last version in the WIP above, I got some feedback that he didn't seem just quite sad enough, that I needed to spice it up a little bit. So I painted over his face and tried giving him a bit more of a sad look, as seen below:

The new version was accepted, so here's the in-game sprite I made from it:


PS. Bikke, or at least his name, is inspired by a character from one of my fav SNES games ever, which is sadly a bit unknown outside of Japan. Can you guess which game and who I'm talking about? :)
Speaking of the school, I realized a while back the one of the school kids still hadn't been reworked! The kid's name is Tim, and he's standing outside the school with his very proud father:

Tim and his father outside the school building

Tim's old portrait
 Now, working on the schoolkids is slightly different because in order to save time, they all use the same uniform. Therefore, the uniform is already made, and I just gotta make a new face for him:
The headless school uniform..!

The WIP :)

Finished Portrait

Time to remake the teacher! The kids surely won't listen to her as long as she is as outdated as she currently is..

The teacher in her natural habitat: Evergrind City's school

Her current portrait, in need of some updating!

The WIP!

And finally, the new & updated portrait!

Time to rework one of the few people actually visiting Evergrind Café: Sylvia! She's visiting the café with her daughter, and doesn't seem too impressed by your character. So rude! Here she is (to the right) in the game, if you've forgotten who she is: 

Sylvia and her daughter at Evergrind's café!
 And here we have her current portrait:
 When reworking her portrait, I gave her a slightly different look in her eyes, as well as a more elaborate necklace. Other than that, she's pretty much the same, only adjusted to fit the new style:


 And finally, here's her new portrait, ready to be put into the game:


Today, Fred returned after having been away for a week and a half visiting his girlfriend and working at her place. To celebrate his return, we decided to go eat at Sibylla, a fast food chain available in Sweden and Finland. It ended up being a really productive meeting, though, since we had quite a few things to discuss regarding Secrets of Grindea. 

Teddy and Fred eating their burgers! I chose hot dogs with mashed potatoes.. :)
First of all, we discussed our to-do lists and made some changes regarding what order we'll do things. For one, we have some enemies for the next area, Mt:Bloom, that Fred finished a long time ago but never turned intro sprite sheets. He's gonna pause what he's doing now to turn those enemies into sheets that Teddy can start working with, while we finish the graphics for the Temple of Seasons enemies.

Teddy is also gonna start working on a couple of quests for the winter area until more of the enemy graphics are done, so he doesn't have to pause every hour or so, waiting for more assets.

We also discussed some things regarding the Temple of Seasons: a special attack for one of the mages/knights and how they could work together, as well as a mini-boss design.

Some notes & sketches for the mini-boss :P
We've settled on making the mini-boss a hydra-like creature with three heads, one for each season. Each head will have a special attack reflecting their season, as well as a regular bite attack. If you're clever, you'll be able to use the heads against each other... But there will be more info about that in a later update, once we have the prototype up and running :)
Time to rework Remedi, the alchemist of Evergrind City! Keeping things short this time, it's basically the same old :) 

Remedi's in-game sprite

His old portrait

WIP of the new portrait!

And finally: his new portrait sprite!

Here's a guy you might not have seen, as he's not in the game right now; the librarian! He's the book-loving guy who takes care of the library in Evergrind City, a house that's been made but is closed off for now. 

Here's his old portrait:


Here's the WIP:


Aaand, here's the new, finished sprite:


Like everyone else, he looks quite a bit different!


It's time for Mrs. Pidgy from Evergrind City to get a remake!

Mrs. Pidgy in Evergrind City, feeding the birds :)

This is probably one of the oldest portraits around, actually; it has only been slightly cleaned up once. Needless to say it was time to update the look!


Her old portrait sprite

Below you can see the work in progress as well as the final rendered version. This time around it seems as if she's been eating a bit more cookies in her older days!

WIP!

Finished version, before resize & cleanup

And here's the final in-game sprite:

I'm finally feeling well enough to work again! Still a little bit slow from the cold, but it's a lot better now.

I'm starting this week with upgrading an old portrait. Usually I tend to remake the portraits completely, but since Sally (the girl in the arena who gives you small hints on what's to come) was one of the later portraits, I simply decided to work with what was already made instead.

Here's the current in-game portrait:


It's not extremely different from the newer ones, but her hair is a bit more messy and she has a bigger nose than everyone else. Also, I think her eyes look a little bit weird, especially the left one. 

Here's the rendered version that I will be working with: 


I'm gonna focus on fixing the three things I mentioned above; her eyes, nose and hair. To do this I simply paint over the existing image on a new layer, tweaking things as I go:

Eyes, Before and After

Hair, Before and After

Nose, Before and After
Finally, I decided to tweak some other things, such as her hairband. I also decided to enlarge her eyes a little. Here's the upgraded rendered version:

And here's the finished sprite, ready to be added to the game:


As you can see, as a final step I removed a bit of the bridge of her nose, to make her portrait fit better with the others (most female character don't have much of that anymore)!

For fun, I decided to add the three different versions I've made of her portrait, so you can see how it's been reworked over the course of the game:

Welp. I was just thinking to myself the other day: "Man, I haven't been sick in like a couple of years or something! I'm so lucky!"

....Guess what? :(

Yeah. I instantly catch a cold, as if some evil spirit heard what I was thinking and decided to punish me! So here I am, with 0 energy, struggling to focus on anything at all. I was really excited to get back into making portraits, especially after all nice comments you guys left yesterday, but I'm just gonna have to spend a few days in bed hoping this crap blows over ASAP.

Hopefully I'll be back in a couple of days with more posts!

Keep being awesome! 
As I mentioned in the previous post, it's time for me to return to portrait making! Today I've been working on the doll/plushie collector girl living in Evergrind City, as seen here inside her home:


And here's her old portrait used within the game:


It was one of the last ones I did in the old style, where I'd gotten at least some experience with portrait making, but it still looks nothing like the newer portraits. So, it had to be remade!

Below is the progress on the new portrait, it's all really straight forward and pretty much the same strategy that I use whenever I make a new thing. Sketching around, settling for line art, cleaning it up, color blocking, adding shadows & light, refining edges... :)


...Aaand here's the result, in its in-game sprite version:


I tried to make her look a little bit younger this time, since I feel that would make sense given her interest in plushies and the like. Also, because I haven't been making portraits for a few months or so now, I was a bit worried that it'd be really hard and take a long while to finish this portrait, but thankfully it wasn't that bad! So, on to the next one :)
Here's all the different versions of the previous room! As usual, there's a bunch of stuff missing that Fred will add later on; in this case various ways of blocking the top doors. Again there's two different waters in this room, which means you won't be able to pass through the room unless it's winter. 

...Or will you..? ;) 

Fall

Summer

Winter
This is actually the last room for a little while! We still need to figure out certain things regarding the boss, mini-boss and a challenge room before I can make the last few rooms. Until then, it's back to portraits for me :)
Sketch

Basics

Adding some props!

The tree, step-by-step!

Autumn version finished!

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