Meanwhile, Fred has started working on something slightly different; namely a set of new animations for a version of Dad you'll run into in the creepy version of Startington you'll find yourself very soon. What happened here?!
It's been a while, but now it's time for another boss portrait! This one featuring, unsurprisingly, the eye boss we've been working on for quite a while now!
Without further ado:
Next up in our Evergrind City improvements spree is the market area, where each of the market stands will get a little bit personality to make them stand out a bit more:
Next up, we're taking a look at the lonely house in the top right corner, which you'll eventually be able to reach through a bridge! Haven't quite decided if we still want to keep the quest to build it or if we'll just put it there one of these days and allow you to enter the house from the first time you enter town: we'll see. Other than that, a fishing boat and some minor decorations to spice up the area :)
With the Ghost Ship drawer ever closer to completion, it's finally time to start thinking about the future and the final dungeon! While we've had a bunch of loose ideas for it before, we felt it's time to sit down and iron out exactly how we want it to be.
The number one thing we've always known we wanted is for it to be a tower of some sort. While we don't feel the need for it to actually feel like a tower on the inside (we'd like it to have more rooms per floor than a typical tower would generally have), that's the sort of general idea we're going for: progression upwards (and the physical shape of a tower from the outside).
We also want each part of the rest of the game to be represented in this final dungeon, so it kind of feels like you progress through the game once more, with each floor being a distinct challenge inspired by the area it represents. As such, our goal is to have 9 different floors, one for each major area and dungeon, with the final boss residing on the 10th. These floors may still contain enemies and details from other areas than the one it represents, creating a sort of surrealistic feel to the whole thing.
We also want some sort of enemy that spawns bosses from previous places here and there throughout the dungeon, culminating in a boss rush containing several of the previously defeated bosses before you can finally reach the 10th floor and the last challenge of the game.
Our next mission will be to take some time and think about what sort of challenges would be nice to see on each of these floors, and puzzle them together into a great final dungeon. As always, if you have any ideas of what you'd like to see, feel free to share in a comment!
(Sorry for the late post, once again I forgot to hit the schedule button... ;-;)
Meanwhile another update from the eye boss progress, featuring the WIPs of more attacks and animations slowly but steadily getting added:
And now, some stuff around the entrance or library area of the town! New lampposts, a slightly fancier path leading up to the library, railing to protect people from falling into the stream, an improved library sign and some decorative mini-trees!
Next up in our Evergrind Improvements spree comes the Arena, which is probably the one thing in Evergrind City that feels the most outdated in my opinion. In order to spice it up a bit we've done a complete new design, that stand out a bit more and is a bit more festive than the old one:
So to kick off the Evergrind improvements, we'll start off with the final (for now) piece of improvement in Evergrind East; the little fishing pond. We wanted to give this part a bit more detail, so we added a Grindea bust and some ruins to give it a bit of character, as well as some more of the greenery and a little path leading up to the pond:
Next up in our improvement spree of the earlier areas is Evergrind City and the areas surrounding it!
We've previously talked about redesigning the city - and we might still get around to that at some point - but for now I'm confident any improvements I'll make to it at this point will be able to be transferred over to any new design we might make, so I haven't been too worried about that when thinking about what parts we can improve upon here.
Once more it's mostly about adding more detail and making things look a bit more unique and detailed, with the exception of the entrance to the arena which I feel looks awfully outdated compared to a lot of the other graphics and will likely be remade completely:
Meanwhile the work on the eye boss continues, and the latest iteration of the laser attack now has proper lasers, and more eyes:
As you can see here, the trick is figuring out which eye colors are not present in the big eye, which will let you know which eyes won't be firing the laser. To make this a little easier we're also adding symbols to the eyes, making them easier to tell apart:
We haven't decided exactly which of these symbols we'll use yet, as we want to pick the ones that are the most clear from the side as well. Fred has already started playing around with what the eyes would look like from the side, but we're not quite there just yet:
We know this boss (and the map in general) is taking ages to finish, but we're determined to not let it go until each of us is fully satisfied with the fight, and we believe that once we've gotten to that point, it will all be worth it (hopefully)!
Next up, Evergrind City's entrance itself, a slightly bigger job adding some decorations and making the wall more prominent:
And so we'll start with the first two sketches, adding some more decorations first to the second Pillar Mountains map:
...and then we move to the area right before Evergrind City to spice up Evergrind East a little bit:
Meanwhile my work outside of the Ghost Ship continues with more improvements, and we're slowly working out way down to Evergrind East; here's a couple more of my sketches for more places we'll improve upon:
One of the things we've done today is working on tweaking one of the eye boss new attacks, featuring a barrage of eyes that will eventually explode! There are a bunch of sliders we can use to tweak this attack, and one of them is number of eyes:
And also the shape of the explosion circles, below with a more circular shape:
The one above is probably closest to what we're aiming for for now, but as with everything else this might be changed with more testing! Hopefully the third floor will be complete enough to run through and test very soon... :)
In Fred's animation department, we're finishing up the eye boss..
...and moving on to more exciting things, namely the creepy things that will appear in that strange version of Startington that you'll soon be visiting, starting with some slime that will cover the entirety of your character:
So, without further ado: The fisherman's area in lower Pillar Mountains! Getting some improvements, a little bit of everything:
Going back to the overall Pillar Mountains improvements, it's time to take a look at the area surrounding Mumrik's tent! I felt this area felt a little bare, so decided to spice it up a bit with some more stuff:
Next up we'll do something similar to the area surrounding the fisherman on the next map, and after that it's time to continue scouting more areas to improve upon!
So, this Startington Home will have multiple versions, and it's time to get going! First a reminder of the first version, and then each consecutively version as they will become available to you, culminating in a version where things have gone a bit... messy to say the least:
