Vilya's Workblog

Time for something slightly different! This is one of the "challenges" we're working on, which is basically a room where you have to move over a bunch of floating platforms - however, the bridges between them will only be visible in the ghost world!

Here you can see a rare glimpse of what it looks like with the colliders in place, as well as what happens if you're on a bridge when you turn back to the regular world (you fall down):

I've been testing out some things in regards to what these bridges might look like, and here we have one of the suggestions, which I think will be the one we'll go for:

And a small test of what it'd look like when the tables are floating the way they should (the eyes on the wall is another mechanic we'll be playing with, something that will force you back into the regular world so it won't be too easy to walk through this room):

Final cabin! This one you'll reach from the room on the right, and will take you back to the corridor where you came from after you've completed everything on the right side (the challenge we haven't 100% designed yet):

Since we're drawing nearer to completing the first boss fight somewhat, it's time to start tying together the first floor! In doing so, I need to rework the first room a bit, as some things have changed in our design since we made it for the first time:

Basically, we're adding another "floor", though all entries and exits are on the first floor of the room. This is so we don't have to add any level differences in the boss room, which will be the room connecting to this one on the left!

Here's the new version:

Second to last cabin! This is the one that connects to its neighbor on the left. Again, nothing much interesting to say about this, I think!

Meanwhile in the programming and animation department, we've started working on the first boss battle! We've made a bunch of prototype attacks and patterns, some which can be seen below:

Here you can see the skull walls that force you out of the ghost world, which we've shown before in a regular enemy prototype. He also throws a bunch of cannonballs at you; has a dash attack and, of course, a regular whack with the sword.

In the second one you can see two other attacks we've been working on; one being some kind of menace that whirls around the room (though we're not 100% sure about this one yet).

The other is a big rock that gets lifted out of water (it currently spawns from nothing, since the actual boss room with the water isn't made yet), and as it gets thrown into a wall or some other such thing, it gets broken into a bunch of smaller pieces the player has to avoid. Right now the broken-up pieces use some old bullet hell-type graphic asset, but that won't be so in the proper version, of course.

We've actually not sure whether we want it to be a rock or some sort of water-ball (or something like that). Another option we had was for it to be a ball of all kinds of stuff he pulls out of the water and merges together, but to be honest we kind of feel that one might be a bit too much work to get nice enough. The experiments continue!

Now it's time to start working on the three bottom cabins, starting with the one on the far left. As with the top two, this one will be connected to its neighbor. Other than that, not much to say about this one!

The third cabin has a platform leading to a higher level! How intriguing! The room on the right of this hasn't been designed yet, but we have a few ideas for a sort of 'puzzle' (actually more like a challenge, I guess), where you'll have to go back and forth into the spirit world to avoid some dangerous ghosts!

The next cabin is pretty much a mirror of the first one, but with some different decoration. You'll reach it from the cabin to the left of it, and exiting it from the bottom door will get you back in the corridor below, but at a place you couldn't reach before.

Time to start working on those cabins! Six in total, and here's the first one. Let's go:

Of course, we're not only working on backgrounds for the Ghost Ship. There's still some enemy stuff to do, one of them being designing the last enemy! So let's take a look at what Fred has been doing:

Congratulations, it's a crab! We really wanted one enemy that would just be a "normal" kind of enemy without any fancy spirit world mechanics, and what better thing to put on a ghost ship than a killer crab? (don't answer that)

As you might guess, the final design we went for is the one within the green circle. Stay tuned for all its fancy animations!

Next up, adding some more stuff to said corridor, and as it turns out, we'll be moving some things around as well. So the basic idea here is that you have to pass through a bunch of these cabins to get where you want to go, so I have to block the path through in various ways.

By doing so, you'll first have to go into the first bottom cabin, find a way from that one into the one on its right, go from that one to the first top cabin and exit it through it's neighbor as well:

Lots of random stuff later, here's what we end up with:

Time for a new room. This looks like a simple enough corridor with seven different doors, but in part 2, I think you'll see that it's not quite so!

The top and bottom doors will lead to cabins where the ship's guests sleep. As you might remember I've already started working on some basic stuff for such rooms, so now it's just a matter of making them with the correct exits.

Anyway, here's the corridor WIP:

And the finished thing:

So, time to start working on that third floor, beginning with the room with the locked door and character busts that I made before. What better thing to add here than - you know it - more tentacles?!

Also some bones, spiders, and other things from the previous floors. Yum.

New week, old adventures! Since I've been making a ton of random props for each of the rooms spirit world version now, I thought it would be a good idea to go over each room and cross-pollute them with props so that creepy spiders won't only appear in just one room, and so on.

This is also a great moment to make sure all the moss is red and all the vines are sickly purple, as well. So, with all that considered, here we have it, the rooms so far in their creepy glory:

And this is all just the two first floors! One more to go!! :D

And to end this week, we have an update from the animation and programming department!

Teddy is now working on implementing and polishing the Ghost Ship mechanics (and catching the occasional bug in the beta), while Fred's full focus is on the Captain we talked about earlier!

There's a lot of strange animation needed for him, and since you'll only see the sword outside of the spirit world, it's a bit of a hassle getting everything to work smoothly. Now, the idle animation is completed, and he's working on getting the attacks down.

Big boss sprites like this are the most difficult to make, so we expect he'll be busy with this for quite some time while me and Teddy continue working on the other parts of the ship!

When testing something, Fred also accidentally made the funniest animation of the captain laughing. Perhaps it will end up being used!?

For this second small room, I thought we'd add a further sprinkling of tentacles and another version of the creepy sack-faces from before. In this room, the jar gets a creepy eye as well. Oh my!

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