SO! Let's begin transforming these islands to their present, ruined versions! In this first post, I'll be focusing on the entrance island, and the old lady's island next to it. 

Before we begin, here's the past state of the islands, as a little reminder:

Now, my first step is to deal with the ground, since its base color will affect the color scheme of everything else (the props have to look good against the background, after all):

In this second step, I've continued working on the ground, with grass growing over the paths. I've also ruined the statues, with one of the female statues destroyed and the other worn by time:

Next, start working on the bridges. They've lost their color, and the top bridge has broken, just like the right one in the past! I also started working on the ground on the small island, which I hadn't touched yet:

For the sign next to the bridges, I decided to go for time wearing the paper off almost completely, showing a wooden surface underneath. It has also lost its colors, pretty much like the bridges:

Then I start working on the walls surrounding the entrance island! While this color change might not make that much sense in the real world, I think it works well here. Not only have the walls become worn down and broken, with holes here and there, it's also become darker and has adopted a more sinister color scheme. While not exactly intended to be rust, I think the red hues of the upper part of the walls make you think along those lines:

Now, with the entrance island pretty much done, it's time to start working on Granny's island for real. Starting with darkening the shades and tuning down those vibrant colors:

Since this old lady loves plants (which we've already seen on the interior versions), I thought it would be cool to have the plants show up on the outside as well - having kind of taken over the house, if you will:

Adding a few flowers to the vines, to match them with the vines inside:

Finally, adding more present-only props with our editor, and removing those that were past-only. While this isn't exactly how it'll appear in the game (some of the trees will have grown larger, etc), it gives you the basic idea:

And here's the GIF process of the whole thing, including some bonus steps! Thanks for reading :)

(After finishing these islands, I quickly realized I should have added more cracks and worn look to the Granny's house - especially to the roof! I'd also like to add more vines. So I'll probably return to this later, in one of those "Mixed Bag" posts!)

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There are still a lot of portraits to be made for the NPCs in zone 2, so I'll probably throw in one or two of these every week! This time it's the chef at the Inn:

Sketch

Line Art

Color Blocking

Shadows

Highlights

Details

Finished Sprite

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Now, since I'm refocusing from interior design to exterior, it's high time to take care of one of the mechanics for the outdoor map!

As I might have mentioned before, you'll be able to raise and lower the water levels, and in doing so things will, of course, change on the map.

So, the first thing I'm gonna fix is the ground. Remember in Temple of Seasons, how you could kind of spot the underlying texture beneath the water?

We kind of want the same effect here, so I'm gonna create something similar.

Step 1, changing the water color to a shade that looks more like you can kind of spot the ground underneath the water. I first tried directly copying the shade from the Temple of Seasons:

However, I didn't really like how that shade looked next to everything else in Tai Ming, so I decided to go for a lighter, cooler hue:

I then started adding some texture to the ground:

To make it seem like the water is going above the cliffs, we added a faded layer of the water color on top of the lowest 2-3 pixels of each platform:

..and then smoothed out the edge between the ground and the water a bit:

Finally, I felt the ground looked a bit lame with just the one texture, so I started adding rocks and moved the texture bits around to make it less random-looking:

All done! And here's the opposite version, with high water levels (which will look much better once the water animations are in ;3):

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...aaand we're officially moving on to zone 2, all of us!

Actually, I had already started working on some zone02 interiors before our meeting earlier this week, so instead of an immediate jump to the outdoors here in the blog, here's the present, overgrown version of the Granny's house first:

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 Today I've been focusing on the Tai Ming zone 1 fixes we talked about earlier! First up, adding another statue that gets pushed back and forth by our ancient stone cutter:

This new statue also has a version in the present:

I also added the remains of the path for the statue you can push around in the past:

Something else I worked on that's related to zone 1 (among other zones), is the look of the windows! From outside, they look like this:

And inside, they look like this:

And while it's OK that they're not 100% the same, I think the differences between them were a bit too big! The glass should at least be divided equally, right? ..Thinking about it, I'm not sure it's a great idea that there's glass in these windows to begin with! Maybe it'd be cooler and feel more old without it, which it kind of looks like from the outdoors anyway? I'll have to talk to my fellow Pixel Ferrets about that, I guess!

Anyway, after fixing the windows a bit, here's the new indoor version (for now):

Another super small fix: adding proper grass above the door. When it got animated, the door was placed above the house, and the decorative grass edge ended up beneath it. To fix this I went into the animation and copy-pasted the grass on top of each animated door frame:

And finally, in zone 2, the stairway to Granny's house has been removed, so now you gotta make your own way there! :)

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So, we're gonna add a stonecutter to the first zone to help people understand that certain statues are, in fact, moveable! 

Fred already made the sprite, which is based a bit on Katarina the stonecutter in present day (a relative, perhaps?): 

So it was up to me to make the portrait! Lately I've realized I spend a lot of time fixing the portraits after we shrink them to in-game size, due to excessive shading and details that don't even make it to the finished product anyway. So I thought I'd cut back on the detail a bit to see if I can finish the portraits faster (while they still look the same as before).

Said and done:

Sketch

Line Art

Color Blocking

Shading

Highlights

Details

GIF

Finished Sprite

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Yesterday we had a meeting where we discussed the first Tai Ming map and all the feedback we received. As some (or many of you) have noticed, it turned out that finding your way back to the locked door in present time after looting the key was a bit more difficult than expected!

At first we thought we'd solve this by adding the option to examine the rubble blocking your way, giving you a hint that you could move it somehow. However, after talking about it yesterday, we decided to try something else first, that's a bit less in your face.

First, we want to add a NPC that's moving a(nother) statue back and forth higher on the map. Hopefully this will make players realize you can move the statues around if you try it.

Second, we're gonna add remnants of the path you can push the statue through in the present day, to nudge your brain in the direction that maybe there's something you can do with the rubble.

We also talked about the second zone, and how to prioritize the work there. I've already begun working on some interior design ("Granny's House", the past version which you've already seen), but we thought it's better for me to start working on the present version of the outdoors instead, so Teddy can start adding the time travel effects there properly.


We also decided to remove the stairway to the above mentioned Granny's house, and have the player build a path with wooden blocks instead - kind of like in the temple of seasons but a bit less difficult hopefully... :)

On that note, as you might remember (or not?), I previously talked about giving the islands more of an organic shape, adding curves and whatnot to them. Well, we officially decided to scrap that for now, and keep them straight like they are.

We have many reasons for this: first, it saves a lot of time when adding water edge animations: we could just reuse the same parts instead of having to make unique ones for every curve of the cliffs. Second, it makes it easier to move the wooden blocks around, both as a player and actually implementing the mechanic!

As a bonus, we've also started talking about and vaguely designed the map that will be above the western Evergrind Fields (above the farm). Once we finish Tai Ming and start working on the desert, this will be the only "dead end" on the map, and since we'd like to remove those annoying dead end messages as soon as possible I thought I'd throw this map together at some point in the near future.

Basically it's just gonna be a quiet forest map with some long-forgotten ruins, which you can't really activate or do anything with until you've gotten to that part in the story, so there's no real reason to wait!

There's still a ton of work left, but I can actually start to see it all coming together now. Soon, there will be no more "this road leads to somewhere that's not implemented yet), and that is a huge milestone IMO! Super excited :D

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