Meanwhile, Fred's been working on more Bishop stuff and some new player animations, one which can be seen here:
Next, time for some mixed stuff! Your mother's grave in Startington, some new items made for an additional part of the ghost remembrance quest in the Ghost Ship, as well as an expression for the newly added ghost you'll find there soon:
For Seasonne, we all felt like the core of the area is the Toy Factory, but we also wanted a little dash of the regular snow area, and an appearance of Marino, since he's a pretty big character and having Amalet stolen from you after Flying Fortress is a pretty important part of the game, after all.
As such, you'll begin this floor by appearing in a small Seasonne-esque area with the usual Seasonne enemies minding their own business. At the end of the area is the Toy Factory building, which you enter, and find yourself in a room with a locked door, a blocked path and a chest. In the chest is a key for the locked door, but before you have a chance to unlock it Marino appears and steals it from you, dashing through the blocked path, breaking the things that blocked your path before.
The next room will be one of two challenge rooms, but we haven't yet decided which one of these it'll be! In one, you think you'll have to solve a block puzzle, only for each and every block and piece of it to come alive so you have to defeat it literally by force. The second would be a lot more like the room where you battle a ton of gift boxes, only with more kinds of gift boxes with new abilities!
After that, you'll end up in a room with a conveyor belt where you'll chase Marino for a bit before ending up in a room where you'll battle him along with having to dodge falling bombs and trains, much like in the later rooms of the Toy Factory!
The next thing we've been discussing and designing for the final dungeon is the Flying Fortress floor. In the beginning we wanted this to be quite phase shift heavy, but as we though more about it we felt the essence of Flying Fortress is more about bullet hells, so we started leaning more towards that. However, we've had a ton a random ideas, among others a phase shift puzzle where you need to collect items within a certain time and a bullet hell with guardians that block parts of the room with their laser beams...
In the end however, we settled for three rooms (for now, this might change), first one of those corridor where a number of orbs pass through and you have to run left and right so you pass through the orbs in the slot where one of the orbs is missing - I'm not great at explaining this in words, but you've already passed through such a corridor in Flying Fortress already, and this one will be pretty much the same - although we have some ideas for beams and such to make it a bit more difficult and high paced.
The second room will have a number of small platforms, 4 or more, which will get hit by a ton of missiles. The goal in this room is to phase shift to the one platform that won't get hit by missiles and as such avoid damage. Once the timer runs out you'll be able to proceed to the final room...
...which is all about bosses, namely Phase man - and not only one, but two of them(!), ending with a little burst of Gun-D4m. We're pretty excited about this combo and hope you will be too!
In Fred's department meanwhile, it's all about Bishop and giving him more animations! Let's have a look:
In Arcade Mode, it's high time we get a proper map through which you can track your progress! As such we've been talking about various ways to illustrate this, ending up with illustrating them as isles:
Now, the layout of these isles isn't in it's finished version here, the idea is that we want to illustrate how you move upwards a bit more, so we'll play around with how we place the isles as we move on; and as such might change the design of these isles a bit as well.
On top of that, there are two more isles missing - that of the room where you get your reward for finishing Arcade Mode, and the bonus floor you get to only if you're strong enough! These will only be added once they've been made in their proper forms in the game, though, so I know exactly how to design their isles.
You've seen a bunch of Bishop's attack animations made by Fred, but now that we have a basic sketch for the arena, it's time to start some prototyping of the fight!
At the moment, Bishop has three distinct attacks/patterns, but we have plans to add more as we go along. For now it's a sword-throwing attack, a giant scythe attack and an attack where a bunch of Bishops emerge from the ground with spears:
We know Bishop disappears a bit into the dark background when he's towards the top of the fight area, but we have plans on making him more visible by adding a shader that makes a subtle aura or outline around him when he's against the dark parts. Other than that, what do you guys think so far?
For the Pumpkin Woods floor, we felt the key component was the curse of the woods, making you unable to progress, and the hunt for each of the items needed to clear the curse. To capture this, our idea is to create a set of rooms with a 'lost woods' feel where you'll end up back in the first room by taking the 'wrong' exit, and having you battle five mini bosses in a room each.
The mini bosses we have in mind here are Pumpking and Helloweed from Arcade Mode, plus a similarly difficult mini boss based around Jack o' Lantern which will also appear as an Arcade Mode floor boss later on! We'll also design a challenge based around the Jumpkins and Ghostys.
For the Jumpkins this will most likely involve a living-vegetable like mayhem room with loads of jumpkins, while the Ghosty challenge idea we have so far is more about finding and defeating the correct one out of a bunch that will surround you - though our ideas here are still very much up in the air. For now, our main focus around this floor is the feel of having to cleanse the wood once more, this time by collecting the items from more difficult enemies than simple elites like you had to the first time around. We'll dice into more specific design details once we get to this floor, our overall idea holds regardless of how we design the challenges.
Once you've defeated all of these mini bosses and collected their key item, you'll be able to cleanse the curse with the aid of a Grindea statue, just like in the original Pumpkin Woods, complete with a minor appearance from Bishop; after that, it's onto the next floor, featuring the Flying Fortress! :)
So last week our goal was to each come up with one or a few design ideas for the first floor in the final dungeon, after which we'd go through each of our suggestions and pick our favourites, building our dungeon one floor at a time.
As we mentioned, our guidelines were to remind people of the journey they've made throughout the game, bringing back "old classic" events and mechanics. Some of our ideas for the first floor, representing the very beginning of the game, ranged from battling your own sword and shield, a bullet hell with wooden swords, bees circulating around you and attacking you one by one, or an arena where you battle a block puzzle that comes alive.
In the end we decided to combine a few elements of the early parts of the game, namely the arena trials, finding your shield and sword to proceed and battling the Black Ferrets on the bridge. Our main idea is that you'll start on a Pillar Mountains looking area (perhaps even a pillar), where you have to find your sword and shield by fishing and solving a block puzzle while the Arena commentator Mr Plott comments on what you're doing, and you'll only be able to proceed after handing your items to Grandpa Joe who blocks a bridge over which you'll battle an ever increasing amount of Teddy & Freddy, culminating in a battle against Vilya herself before you'll be able to progress to the second floor, a floor which will be centered around the Pumpkin Woods.
We also decided on some details around the dungeon. Previously, we've decided that the thing that turns the dungeon into what it is is an ancient artefact mirror, which transforms the tower into challenges to stop you from reaching the top. As such, we want to incorporate various mirror effects here and there (like for instance, Grandpa Joe shattering into glass pieces when you show him your sword and shield, enemies spawning by appearing through mirror glass and such). We also reiterated that we want the main focus for each floor to be something iconic to each part of the game, focusing on the story beats and 'feel' of certain areas.
Next up, the Pumpkin Woods floor... :)
In Fred's department, it's been all about figuring out the look for one of the most important characters in the game that hasn't yet appeared in the game in her physical form.... That is, of course, Grindea! She'll appear as part of the ending, so we've been figuring out how to illustrate her form by having Fred make a ton of sketches!
Here you can see the progress of how it's evolved:
Originally, we envisioned her as more of an ordinary character, but in the end we went for a bit more shapeless approach, and so these last two are our current favourites! What do you guys think?
Time to start working on the background for the card cave! As you can see, the Mount Bloom mountain walls make it feel a lot more like a cave than in the sketch:
I haven't made the slots for the cards yet, as they will need to be animated with glowing lights and such I thought it best to leave that up to Fred for now so the size of them will work out!
Another thing I've been working on recently has been sketching a couple of the last bunch of maps needed for Story Mode, one which is the room where your card collection is shown and which will grant you a special reward once you've collected all of them:
This room will be in Mount Bloom, in front of where the dragon carving on the floor used to be. In this initial sketch, it doesn't look very mountain-y, but that will be remedied in the final version, which will probably look slightly different in the end, but the concept will remain the same: slots for cards on the wall, and some similar looking decorations across the room to make it look more interesting.
The other room I've been sketching has been the strange realm where you'll battle Bishop! In the beginning we wanted this battle to take place in a surreal dream world governed by Grindea, but after some thought we changed our mind; while Grindea is light, we feel that Bishop is more of a dark creature, and having his battle be in a proper Bishop-y realm would be best.As such, my design for the room is a bit more grim looking that our initial plan:
Again, it will likely look slightly different in the end, especially once the proper graphics are made, but you get the overall concept and colour scheme!
Next, time for a bunch of mixed things: a bunk bed in Trick & Treat's house, some new better looking graphics for some of the ambience box sounds, and a new item based on a backer's request! :)
So we're drawing ever nearer to that final dungeon, and now that we've had some time to think about it, we've discussed taking a different approach to it!
We've gone through several iterations already, although none of them have actually left the sketching board as of yet. At first we wanted the dungeon to have one floor representing each major area in the game, then we considered mixing various themes together and at some point we wanted fewer floors but more of a mishmash of everything.... The only thing we've really always agreed upon throughout all this has been that it shouldn't be super long - often we feel like when players get close to the end of a game, there's always a risk of getting fatigued and running out of steam just before the final boss, an effect that is often made worse by overly long and complex final dungeons and boss fights.
Our latest idea is to have several shorter floors - some or possibly most just a single room's worth, and each floor will touch upon something you've seen or experienced in the game, but in a sort of strange way - imagine something like the creepy version of Startington, but decidedly less creepy and with more gameplay elements!
Our mission for this week game design wise will be to come up with a bunch of room ideas for the first stretch of the game, up until Flying Fortress, and present our ideas on Friday. Which events throughout the game do you find most iconic and would be something you'd expect to see represented in a dungeon like this? And how do you feel about the length of final dungeons? Do you expect a super long finale, or do you prefer it to be a little shorter?
In Fred's department, it's all about giving Bishop some more weaponry! Scared yet?
You know what, said and done, time to touch up these old UI graphics a little bit:
Next up, we're working on adding that stuff to the arena! As part of that, you'll be able to select difficulty for the boss rebattles, and so I was tasked with making an interface for said difficulty setting:
As you can see, there will be three settings available, and they will be Default (the way the boss was when you first encountered it), Scaled (which means we scale its difficulty to your current level), and Overpowered (which will be a much more difficult version, overpowered for your current level)! I haven't added the texts to the buttons here as they will the rendered directly in the game engine:
Working on this interface again makes me feel like it looks a little bit bland, so I feel like I might improve on its general look in the near future as well.... :)
So the first thing for me to do is a proper house for the Trick & Treat twins. We might postpone any optional boss battle they might have been part in, but they still get a house of their own!
The first floor was made ages ago when we still had big plans for those guys, so I decided to add a bit more detail to it:
This place will also be the home of another smaller character (in more than one way) - the evil mandarine I made a portrait of quite a while ago (still remember him?)
Good evening everyone!
Have you had great holidays despite the strange year we left behind? We've been taking it easy, not meeting to many people - in fact, me and Fred and Fred's brother (whom he lives with) decided we wouldn't go anywhere and risk getting or spreading the virus, so we celebrated christmas and new years together on the island instead!
Today we got back to work, and the first thing we decided on doing is having a meeting to discuss our upcoming patches!
There are three big patches left, one featuring the final story mode stuff (except for the ending bit), where we'll add the last bunch of backer items, some arena stuff (making you able to rebattle bosses in the arena + some bonus challenges), adding a fight with bishop and the cave where you can track your progress on how many cards you've found (as well as getting a special item once you've collected them all).
The second patch will involve Arcade Mode, where we'll be reworking the challenge rooms to make them a bit more fun and varied, add a proper map so you can track your progress, adding a proper room to end your runs as well as a final boss battle featuring none other than the goddess herself, Grindea! We're also gonna make sure we feel each run is varied enough and possibly add more types of rooms to make sure each new run won't get too repetitive.
The third and final patch before proper release is the Main Story ending patch, where we'll add the final dungeon, both endings and both final bosses (the version of the battle you face will depend on whether it's the default or true ending path you're on)! It's possible we'll save the final battle of Arcade Mode to this patch as well, so both endings come out at the same time.
We're aiming for the first patch to be done by the end of March - however we're not sure whether this is actually realistic or if we're just being hyped after having some time off for two weeks! Regardless, we'll do our best to make it happen :)
Stay tuned for our continued progress as we head into this new year together!
