Vilya's Workblog

Okay, now that the new bunch of floors are properly completed, let's celebrate by taking a quick break from Arcade Mode and make another portrait featuring yet another sailor (can't have too many of those in a harbor town, right?):

And the finished portrait:

It's the final part of the Tai Ming floors!! And you guessed it, it's turning all those polished and clean Past props into their present, ruined versions!!

Actually, since we decided each room will only be available in one of the timelines, I decided to not do exact replicas of some things, such as the buildings. With these I felt it'd be more interesting to bring in more designs to create more variations. Here's a few of the buildings that might appear on your run:

The fences were more straight forward, just make a ruined, old-looking version of each part:

And finally, the new (very old looking!) bridges to connect islands or help you cross over streams:

Okay, time to finish up those Arcade floors! There's a couple of pretty important maps missing from both the Tai Ming and the Mount Bloom floors that need to be added before they are truly complete: the score counting screens!

Whenever you finish a floor in Arcade Mode, you'll run through a corridor of some sort while the game shows you your current score and how well you did in each room of the floor. These corridors are either connecting two floors of the same area, or serve to connect one type of floor with the next. The first corridor shown above is the corridor that will bridge the two Mount Bloom floors, while the second leads the way into the Tai Ming floors.

Below you have two types of the same corridor, one for past and one for present. Which one you'll pass through depends on what boss you fought against. Meanwhile, when you transfer from Tai Ming to the desert maps, you'll simply walk through a door from the Mimic room.

In order to have a proper exit from the above corridors, I had to extract and polish up the entrance/exit to the courtyard used in story mode and make a version of it in both timelines as well:

Finally, some minor changes to one of the boss rooms (the Arcade Mode version, that is):

Instead of having to limit ourselves to having this boss appear after going through a mountain wall, we decided to remove the lower mountain part and adjust how things were placed slightly, so we can put a regular fence there instead (and as such be able to place the boss map anywhere on the map rather than along a mountain). In order to do this we also had to repaint the lower parts of the vertical mountain wall, as can be seen in the second picture.

Now there's just one more thing to do before these floors are fully complete (unless I'm forgetting something)!! Stay tuned for tomorrow ;)

Whew, after close to one week in bed sniffing away with the flu, I'm actually feeling alive again and more than ready to get back to work! Unfortunately I cursed Teddy with the flu as well, so he's been down and out for a while too (but is also starting to get back on his feet as I write this)... Fred seems to have remained immune this time around, hopefully that means he'll escape its clutches!

Because 2/3rds of the company has been unable to do much work the past week, there aren't much in terms of news! We are drawing ever closer to being able to move into our new office space though, so that's super exciting and we're all looking forward to it (and have already begun planning how we'll move everything and changes we need to make to make it all work for us).

As I mentioned last week, the office will be available to us from the Dec 1st, but we're not sure whether we'll actually be able to move in then (or rather, the Monday after), or if we'll have to wait for the moving company to schedule us in. Since we don't have too much stuff to move but the items we do have are quite cumbersome to transport in the tiny car that's available to us - in fact we don't think the larger of the two desks will fit in it even if we unscrew the whole thing- we decided for our peace of mind it's probably better to hire a couple guys to move it for us. Less risk of us dropping and breaking stuff, and having to solve how to transport a much too large table.. Carry it to the office by foot, a healthy 50 minute walk...? Hmm. Anyway, we don't know when they'll be available yet, but we do hope we'll be able to move in sometime next week!

Now, I'll be getting back to work properly today, and have already started off by sketching what the final desert map will look like (ignore my amazing misspelling of fight...):

The are three important areas in this map. First, the entrance to the city, indicated by the arrow pointing downwards. Second, the battle area in front of it, where you'll battle a mini-boss and possibly some random enemy spawns. Third, the Saloon in the top part of the map, home of the shady people of the country. I want to make wanted posters in the surrounding area, featuring the gangsters you'll meet in there. Maybe you'll even run into a set of suspicious ferrets again...

The rest of this week will, however, be focused on finishing up the new Arcade Floors (some minor things remaining), and after that I'll do the last interiors for the Arcadia town rework - just a few left! Once those are done we'll start designing the new interfaces needed to get all the new systems up and running, and then test, test, test before we're finally ready to release it all to the public! We're very excited about the rework and though it's a little while left before it's 100% ready we hope you are too :D

As you may or may not know, for these last four years or so, we've had our office in a spare room (the guest room) in our apartment. It's been pretty nice having your workspace so close, but it has also had its own challenges, such as being easily distracted by the pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen when you should be working, or simply not knowing where work ends and where free time begins (hint: it never really ends when you technically live in the office).

Last time we went to a semi-regular After Work event for the game design industry here on the island, we heard there were office spaces available where some of the others work, and the more we thought about it, the more we realized we might actually benefit from having a small office outside of our home. This way we'd be able to keep work and free time more separate, hopefully making it easier to focus on both, while actually getting outside more (enforced 2x10 minute walks through Visby to get to the office and back) compared to leaving the apartment twice per week for groceries.

So last week we went to check on one of the spaces, and we kind of fell in love! It's on the third floor, rather small but not much smaller than the space we're currently in. It honestly didn't take much thought before we decided to go for it!

It'll be available to us from the 1st of December, so expect some exciting posts as we move into our new office and make it ours. I don't have any pictures of it right now, but I'll make sure to take plenty once we're actually moving in.

Meanwhile, I am actually destroyed by a nasty flu from hell that just decided to take a turn for the worse over 2½ weeks in (hello fever), so this will likely be the only post you get from me this week. Fred and Teddy will continue working as usual, but as I'm the one in charge of updating our blogs this will be a rather silent week, I'm afraid. Hopefully a few days in bed will finally make this go away!

Until then, have a nice week all of you :)

One more week of fishy updates, but this is the last one! With this post all the fishes have been animated and are ready to be added to the aquarium:

Now that those are out of the way, Fred can finally go back to creating NPCs for the desert, which is what we'll be diving into as soon as we finish up our Arcade Mode business. There are still quite a backlog of portraits I've made over the months for random character that will live there, so he has his work cut out for him for a while!

And now, moving on to boss rooms! Each of our bosses are in rather special places, so instead of just sticking them into random rooms, we decided to edit and adjust the areas they are in to fit the Arcade version instead.

Starting with the Mimic, it's pretty isolated in it's own room, so technically we could just have had it appear inside a random interior. However, since we want to show off that the Mimic is coming (in more ways than simply having the skull map indicator for those who are looking), we decided to bring in the entrance to his lair from the game:

Of course, a few adjustments were needed. For one, we didn't want to use the whole map, so we extracted the building part, removed the door, and added ropes to keep you from going up the stairs:

Trying it out in photoshop, it doesn't look too shabby when you connect it to the stone fence:

We also added some specific decorations for when this room appears, so that nothing will get cut off:

As for the Thorn Worm boss, its arena is pretty set in the middle of town:

...But we extracted the whole building and made it a map of its own, removing all the distracting surroundings and fixing things that got broken in the move. Here, too, we added a bunch of decorations surrounding the battlefield, and you'll be able to exit to the next floor by going through the big door:

As for the third boss, the Priestess...

...we use pretty much the same method! Extract the whole area, remove things that are unnecessary to the fight and fix any things that need fixing. In this case there was no version of the building with an open door, and since we want the player to progress into the next floor through its interior, I had to repaint the area surrounding the door to make it open:

Now we just need to make a corridor that you will run through in either past or present state depending on which of the bosses you faced, in order to reach the next floor!

As for the final part of interior creation for these floors, there's of course turning everything into its present version, ruined and forgotten!

Some of you may remember a discussion we had about whether the player would pass through the same rooms, once in past and once in present, or whether enforced time warps between rooms would determine whether the next room is past or present (and as such only available in that state).

Back then we were more into the idea of reusing the same rooms and showcasing them in both past and present, but since then we've realized that having the rooms isolated in either a past or present state is more time efficient, and in the end, may be more straight forward for the player as well. In the earlier version it would mean there are two states of the map at the same time, with different room types in them (challenge rooms and the nurse, for instance, would only be available in one of the states and you'd have to travel back and forth if you wanted to return to them after changing time).

So, with that decision, it opened up the opportunity to make even more layouts for the present type rooms, allowing for even more variation!

Here's some of the wall and floor decorations:

And here's a bunch of mix and matching, showing all types of rooms:

One step closer to finishing these arcade floors, wohoo! :)

Continuing with the interior designs, it's now time to make a bunch of rooms that go in the other direction (horizontally)! Starting off in the same way, deciding on size and adding the basics:

Then adding a bunch of wall and floor decorations:

And here are some mix and match examples of what these houses can look like:

While there isn't a ton of variation, there also won't be a lot of house interiors, and even if there were we think with the number of variations it's probably not going to look too much the same (especially when you compare it to previous floors, which were all very basic and same-looking)!

This week it's time to move on to doing some interiors for the Tai Ming arcade floors! Since Tai Ming is a town, it would be kind of weird to not have any houses you can go into, so we decided to make a few variations!

First up, deciding on the sizes (paying extra attention to the user interface limitations this time):

Starting off with the wider of the rooms, I add some basic walls and floors to create a shell we can use to decorate these interiors in various ways:

First up this entails wall decorations! For this shape, we have three variations of what the walls can look like:

...and they in turn can be combined with three different floor layouts:

Using these six types of decorations, we can mix and mach and create quite different rooms, even though the shape is the same! As you can see, we also added another type of floor texture to mix things up even more:

And then, it's just doing the same thing all over again, but with the smaller version of the room:

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