Today I'm gonna show you a shorter video where I make two slightly different houses! As you might have noticed in plenty of my videos, I copy & paste a lot of stuff that I made previously. Sometimes I alter the colors a bit, sometimes the shape, and sometimes I leave things pretty much as they were.
When it comes to houses, in this instance, I move whatever parts I can use around (and sometimes swap colors) and then fill in whatever's missing once I'm done. I [.....]
Today has been another of those days where you do plenty of tiny tasks, rather than focus on a single one! Let's take a look:
One of the things that have been requested very frequently is the ability to trade and/or drop items so your friends can pick them up! So far we haven't had that function in SoG, but from soon on, you'll be able to drop items on the ground in Story Mode (not in Arcade, as it'd be a bit OP in multiplayer [.....]
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| Original Sketch |
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| The finished garden! |
Just one more portrait before I jump back into pixel art! This is a nameless woman that we haven't decided on exactly what she's gonna do yet, but we're gonna need a bunch of random NPCs to help you on your way through this dungeon, so I kind of freestyled a bit :)
Here we go:
Line Art
Color Blocking
Shades
Highlights & Details
Finished sprite, regular and 2x version :)
[.....]
I'll keep on making portraits for a little while, so here's another one! Alternating pixel art and painting is a nice way to alternate work and keeps me from getting bored. So I'll probably swap back and forth between these as we keep on working with the Time Travel Town-thingy!
Now, this one is actually a younger version of one of the characters that you already saw, the Mountain Girl from a few weeks back (yes that means you'll visit multiple years when you travel back in [.....]
I mentioned it yesterday, and today it's happening! Some slightly different videos, and a bunch of step-by-step pictures, as well.
As you may or may not have guessed, the new subject is portraits. As this dungeon is really a town in which you travel back and forth in time, there will be a bigger focus on characters and actual questing rather than getting through a temple from point A to point B (though there will be quite a lot of that as well). And as you know, [.....]
So, we've spent dome time coming up with and discussing a variety of hurdles and quests/puzzles for you to solve on your way through this dungeon, most involving time travelling in some ways! Since this dungeon really will be a village of some sort, we decided to divide the area into several zones, rather than rooms as we've done with the previous temples.
Since the last Time Travel Village-post I've been playing around with making a few houses and some decorative props!
We also discussed exactly what we wanted the area to look like, and decided that we wanted it to feel like a mix of the outdoors, while still being inside a cave. So, to mix the two together, we're opening up holes in the cave, where the outside can be seen (much like it works in the Flying Fortress part of the game), and the ground will be [.....]
So, in order to get things going with the Time-Travel Temple/Village I've spent some time gathering photos to serve as inspiration for the area graphics-wise. For some of you, particularly those who work with game design, this process will probably be well known to you.
Basically, I Google around for images that suit the themes of the area, in this case various things associated with ancient Asia. I then throw them all into a folder where I can browse them easily, or make one or a few [.....]
Last week, Fred got back after spending 2 weeks in Germany. As usual, we celebrated his return by going to our favorite fast-food restaurant, armed with our sketching books and multiple discussion topics!
One of the most important things we discussed was the next temple, because after just one more area has been implemented (Mt: Bloom), it's time to start working on it. I may have mentioned some ideas here before: the theme of the temple will be time travelling, and the setting will be reminiscent of [.....]
One of the things we're working on right now is finishing up the skills. We still haven't implemented the final charges, which would be the most epic version of each spell, and the one that deals the most damage.
So, I thought I'd just throw this out here: what would you like to see? What would your idea of an ultimate version of any of the spells be?
Our guidelines right now is to keep the spells doing what they currently do, but in a more epic way - meaning a single target spell is still a single target spell, and an aoe crowd control ability remains dealing aoe damage and can still be used for [.....]
Today I'm bringing more treasure hunting maps! This time a bunch of hand drawn ones:
I know, I know, these are all also very obvious, aren't they?! I really just wanted something braindead to do while being groggy from the lack of sleep (I made these too while being sleepless from the toothache) :) There will be plenty of more difficult/tricky ones, I promise!
Speaking of braindead tasks, I forgot to make transfer screens for the Winter -> Temple of Seasons and [.....]
We often get the question why we are trying to make Secrets of Grindea with only three people, most likely from people that have become frustrated with how slow our progress is. In this post I'd like to address the reasons for why we haven't tried to expand our team, and why we most likely won't ever do so.
Reason #1: Efficiency
This might sound strange, but in many ways bringing in more people wouldn't necessarily make working on the game faster. The biggest problems would probably be in the programming department, where each piece of code needs to work with everything else, but it'd definitely be an issue for the graphic artists as well.
At [.....]
Today I'm continuing to work with rooms for arcade mode! This time I'm gonna translate the autumn room into a winter and summer version. Most of the job has already been done and what remains is mainly color swapping stuff, so this post will be a bit shorter :)
When color swapping the autumn room into winter and summer, I had to adjust a few things (such as the placement of a few floor tiles and some details on one of the vines), so if you [.....]
Okay, it's time to get back to business. I mentioned in the last weekly recap that I was working on rooms for the Temple of Season-floors for Arcade Mode, and today you can start seeing the results.
To begin with, we settled on three different sizes for the rooms. We selected these sizes based on rooms from the temple in Story Mode but also on Arcade Mode floors we thought were of a good size.
I then start creating the very basics for each room [.....]
Cheers!
