Vilya's Workblog

Now that I've made a bunch of rooms & areas in the past version of the time travel area, it's time to start transforming them into their present states, where time had taken it's toll, leaving things forgotten, broken & overgrown.

In this video I'll transform the Storage Room from last week into it's present state:

The finished room

This week we start off with a new portrait! Here's a kind lady from the next temple area :)

Line Art

Color Blocking

Shading

Highlights & Details

Finished sprite

Time for another of those posts with a bunch of smaller things!

In order to properly complete the Temple of Seasons Arcade Mode floors, you've commonly had to progress to the first room of the next area floor before being sent back by the Mayor, who is there waiting for you. So far we haven't added that yet, as we've been missing two maps until recently!

First, the transfer map between Temple of Seasons and Mt:Bloom:

Then the first Mt:Bloom room, where the Mayor will await you:

I've also been making some random improvements to the Time Travel area backgrounds I made before:

A doormat

Flowers in the bushes

New rocks, edits of the grassy edges

Oh yeah, we're also trying to make sure magic users have more equipment to choose from, so I put together a set of 'mage robes' that will be used to increase magic stats:

Next week I'll continue showing new backgrounds & portraits for the Time Travel area! Stay tuned~ :)

Another portrait! This time it's the grown-up version of the Mountain Boy from a couple of months ago :)

Hope you enjoy the video:

Line Art

Color Blocking

Shading

Highlights

Details!

Finished sprite

Another background! This time it's the home of an old man taking care of two kids, who will become quite important to the storyline.. :)

Thankfully I believe the recording went fine this time around.. Phew :D

The finished room:

So right before entering the time travel area, you'll be exploring some sort of cave system with traces of some old civilization, right?

Well, a couple of days ago I thought that it'd be really cool to have some kind of adventurer type of guy appear there, and and other places with ruins & stuff (such as the desert). So I talked to the others about it and since they liked the idea I started working on his portrait!

And here it is:

Line Art (I stole the hat from Mr. Westwood of Evergrind farm ^o^)

Color Blocking

Adding some shades~

Finished rendering!

Transformed into sprites :)

Yay, back to making backgrounds for the Time Travel area! :D

In this timelapse video I'll be creating a storage room. Unfortunately, somehow the recording software died without me noticing a few hours in, so there's a bit of a jump before the end... Oh well, I hope you enjoy anyway T_T

Here's the finished room:

The final (?!) menu edit is here!! This time, it's the Character tab, featuring a bunch of stats, your pet, and some other random info about your character! Let's begin with the old version:

SO TERRIBLE! There's brown EVERYWHERE, it looks boring, it's uninspiring... Nope, it won't do. I want more colors, more graphics, perhaps some additional for-fun info about your character.

Ready?

Here it is:

Wohoo, the new ID! It's an actual ID, with a made up ID number that will be randomly generated for your character.

You'll also see your current Collector Rank (in the future we would like to have your character increase his/her rank by doing certain side quests, but for now it'll just be for show).

There's also your birthday (I just put in a random year for this mockup, not sure which year it actually is yet), and your Starsign, both which will be randomly generated (for now, at least).

The stats are the same as usual, though we'll remove HP and EP, as those are always visible through the GUI on top. We're also replacing Concentration, which is a stat you can't affect anyway, adding EP Reg instead. In this mockup, I simply removed the two lower stats, illustrating how many lines we need in the box after removing HP and EP, so the stats you see above will be a bit different once it's actually implemented.

For now, the image in the top left is the Collector's Emblem, but if we add actual ranks in the future we might use different medals or emblems symbolizing your current rank instead.

Yeah, I think that's basically it. Perhaps now I can finally go back to working on the next temple, wohoo! :D

Alright, so before jumping into what I believe will be the final menu edit (the character tab), it's time to start uploading the Steam graphics so we have all of that in place. As I'm sure you've noticed, a bunch of different banners are used throughout the Steam store, and each demo or DLC has to have all of the same banners, whew!

So, here they are, the ones we'll use for now (perhaps we'll update them before actually releasing the finished game, we'll see):

Regular Banners

Demo Banners

Hat DLC Banners

So yeah, we'll be having the "pre-order" Valkyrie helmet/hat as a DLC, so people who only purchase stuff through the Steam store have a chance to get it as well.

Honestly, it's gonna feel kind of ridiculous to offer a single hat as a DLC like that, but technically I guess it's kind of the same as buying the Rabby Tier (which we love when people do, obviously, every cent goes a long way in helping us stay afloat), and it would feel kind of unfair to people who can't get it outside of Steam to "ban" them from getting it..!

So that's the plan, hopefully we don't come across like super evil, full of ourselves AAA guys for offering it solo as opposed to bundling it with the game like with the Rabby Tier T_T

Oh yeah! Yet another step of menu edits, this time it's what appears in the infobox to the left when you hover over a skill:

Mockup of the old and new skill info!

In the old version, you pretty much only knew what you had to pay to unlock a skill, and if you already spent some points on it, it'd say something vague like "damage+", indicating that using another skill point would increase the damage of the skill (duh).

In the new version, we've added some basic information about each of the spells, using a ranking system from 1-5. A skill with high damage output will have more points in damage, a spell that takes a long while to charge will have few points in speed, etc. Utility indicates if and how much a skill can be used utility wise, where skills that slow or freeze (for instance) will receive higher points than a pure dmg skill.

We're still playing around with this, but I think this, as well, is moving in the right direction (though I do get some kind of comic-sans feel from the font, but I believe it's rendered a bit differently ingame so here's to hoping it doesn't give off that vibe when it's actually implemented).

So yesterday we spent the day at Fred's place, eating yummy BBQ and planning the near (and distant) future of the game. As you probably know, we're currently focusing on getting everything together for a Steam Early Access release. Way back we made a list of things we wanted to add or improve with the game before launching on early access, and today we checked what things we have left and if anything else has changed.

Our old Pre-Steam EA to-do list :)

Right now, the biggest thing we have left is finalizing the Gold Charges for each of the spells, a task that has kept Fred busy for a few weeks (making animations & special effects), and that Teddy has started with more recently, after doing a ton of bug-fixing. We currently have a bunch of prototypes implemented, but some of them need more finalized art, and some needed a bit of tweaking.

So, once we finished eating, we sat down and went through all of the prototypes, making notes about what to add or change with them. Then we discussed all of the skills that haven't been implemented yet, talking about how they should work and what types of special effects still need to be made in order for them to look as cool as possible!

Fred trying out some prototypes with Teddy watching

Once we had that all planned down, we talked about what tasks I should be working on in the near future. As you've probably noticed, I have been spending some time editing the menus, in hopes that they'll look a bit fancier before we launch the whole Early Access thing. I still have a couple of things left that I wanna improve, and one of those things is reworking the Character Tab, which IMO currently looks absolutely terrible. So, we talked a bit about what that could look like, before moving on to discussing the temple.

Fred explaining one of his puzzle ideas, Teddy listening

We only touched upon this subject briefly, as the detailed planning of each Gold Charge skills took quite a bit of time (honestly, it took FOREVER)! We mainly talked about a couple of new puzzle ideas and how to implement them, as well as what parts of the temple I need to finish next. The thing I love about this temple is that since most of your progress will take place in a village, with time travelling being the important mechanic, we can come up with all sorts of puzzle ideas without restricting ourselves too much. Super fun!

Anyways, I should get back to work! Time to finish up the menu edits, then it's back to the temple for me. :D

(ps. Don't forget to tune in to E3! Today's the final day!)

As you know by now, I have this grand plan of improving the in-game menu! The next part of that plan involves the Equipment tab, which looks totally drab right now:

At the very least, I wanted some decorative art for the titles, as well as fancier texts! As I worked on that, though, I also figured that a dash of background decorations would probably help this tab along a bit as well:

The actual title texts will be rendered in the game engine, so it'll be possible to translate them. As such, they might not look exactly like this, but the color and style should be approx. the same! Also, the icons on the left and right side of the Gear and Style titles will be 'loose', so if certain languages use a longer name for 'gear', the icons will keep the same distance from the text, instead of having the text pass over 'em.

Now, time for me to head over to Fred's place! We're gonna have a looong meeting where we'll discuss what I should make next for the temple (yay!), some final details on the Gold charge skills, and what Support skills we want in the game. Also a good time to eat some yummy BBQ food, since it's summer and all!

Aside from the obvious issues with the actual hairstyle sprites, I've also been incredibly underwhelmed with the color options we currently have in the game. This is an issue with the clothes as well (and that will be fixed at some point too), but it has mainly bugged me when it comes to the haircolors.

Basically I felt that meny of the palettes were made with little to no thought of how it'd actually look on the character, and more of a "well I guess color x should have 3 options as well". A lot of the color options were really similar, and many had really dull and non-vibrant colors as a result of bad recolor work.

So, I went over those as well! And here's the result, featuring all the different hairstyles at least once:

Some of these palettes may not look super different next to eachother, but that's mainly because of the different hairstyles. There will be a bigger difference between one color and the next when actually using the same hairstyle, the reason for this being that some hairstyles use a greater number of bright (or dark) pixels, making the overall color look brighter(or darker) than it would have on another style.

Hope you like these new looks! :)

Time for the male haircuts to get reworked! Basically, it's all the same as with the female hairstyles: fixing issues with missing pixels and cleaning the shading up a bit, trying to make it less messy.

Old Version:

Reworked Version:

Also, yes, I tagged these posts as being 'Equipment & Drops' mainly cause that's how we've classified the hairstyles in our systems... They're actually in the same folder as hats and facegears!

Now, you might think this would be the last part of reworking the haircuts but oh no... There's more action tomorrow, this time featuring palette edits! :D

Oh yes, more reworks! This time, the haircuts. These things have had a bunch of problems, actually, and fixing them has been on my to-do list for quite some time.

The perhaps most glaring issue with the old haircuts were that some of them are downright faulty: some pixels missing here and there, allowing skintone pixels to shine through... So yeah, not very good. Also, the quality of the pixel art wasn't exactly super high, given that they were (also) among the first things I made for the game.

So, I basically just went over each and every one of the hairstyles, fixing problems and reshading them as I went. Here's the first batch, featuring the female versions!

Old Version:

Reworked Version:

Some of them might have a shade or two too many, but overall I think they are a lot better, especially in terms of understanding what the hair is actually doing.

Tomorrow, it's time for the male versions!

Alright, back to reworking the menu! This time around, I'm working on the entire left side of the menu, trying to tie things together. In doing so, we have a bunch of options, and I'm not quite sure which one I like best.

What do you guys think?

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Option 4

Option 5

Do you like the more simply and airy ones, like option 4-5, or the more graphics heavy 1-3? Less is more, or more is more? It's a tough question!

Another bunch of small things, that are now live in the frontline beta as of yesterday!

1. The Arcade Mode achievements for Temple of Seasons (which I previously showed here) have been changed from showing a winter room to an autumn room. The reason for this is simply because we wanted a bigger difference between the appearance of Temple of Seasons and the Seasonne (winterland) achievements.

2. You can now unlock the achievement for fishing all the Winterland fishes :D

3. When opening the menu, you typically see your character in the character box to the left, against a background representing the area you're currently in. Previously both Evergrind City and the Collector's HQ lacked such a background, leading the character box to show you as being in the Pumpkin Woods inside the HQ.. Now, that has been fixed!

4. I made a slight change to the Snowbacca hat, having it go down a bit further in the back. Perhaps a matter of taste, but I think overall I like the new look better.

5. There are now 3 new items (aside from the hats) that can be gained from unlocking achievements in Arcade Mode! First, there's a trinket that gives you semi-visibility, like a ghost. Then there's an item summoning a fae that follows you around, like Naniva in the story mode. And last, you can get a taming item that allows you to tame bees!

I had the drop appearances for these three items uploaded, but unfortunately we decided to change the look of them last-minute so you'll have to do without them for now.. :D

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