Patches & Flowers

So the patch featuring Tai Ming's first map has been launched on Frontline! Wohoo! If you haven't played through it yet, go ahead and let us hear your feedback :)

For those of you who played already, you might notice that the Plantae Hostilis, or the moss enemy thingy, works a bit differently from last time I showed it in the blog. In previous iterations the flowers it launched exploded on impact (with the ground), but since then we reworked it a little.

Basically we had two options that we tried out, one where the flowers took root and grew large, only to stay on the playfield for a while before exploding. Running into them would trigger the explosion as well, so you had to care where you stepped:

The second option was more or less a mix of the old version and the version mentioned above. The flowers would grow large before exploding after only a short while:

We thought this version was the better one, in the end, since it made sure you really saw where the explosion would take place clearly (it was a bit of an issue with the old version, where they just exploded upon landing), while not filling the area with more things to avoid. Here's the version from our latest patch, featuring the finalized graphics:

Now, after launching the patch we realized a lot of people had problems understanding where to go after getting the key to the upper left house. We're thinking of adding a little hint at the place where you can move things around, either in the past or present (or both) to make it more clear.

I'm actually really surprised since I thought it would be all too easy to figure out, but it turns out it was the opposite! See how awesome it is to have people helping out with testing? Thanks again, guys! You're really helping us out :)

Now I'm kind of makes me worried for the more complicated time warp puzzles in zone 2 instead, haha! Maybe we've overdone it a bit? But hopefully after this first hurdle people will get used to the thought of things changing in the past also affecting the future, which makes the upcoming ones a bit easier! :)

Since I prepared these portraits for upload but never found a post to squeeze them into, here's a bunch of Zhamla faces with the crown to end this kind of random post: