Time to start working on the houses in the upper parts of the first Tai Ming zone! We'll begin with this one, the right house:
What we need to fix here is, first of all, to make the entire think look more worn. But we also need to cut off a big part of the back of the house, as well as make the house impossible to enter. With that in mind, let's begin!
And here's the result (click to view the fullsize version):
[.....]
Today we're launching one final Frontline patch before we upload all the Mount Bloom things to the Stable beta! This time we're adding a bunch of new items:
... that will be sold by a new shop keeper temporarily appearing at Evergrind Festival (except for the icicle-looking thing (which has since been recolored to purple and is supposed to be the crystal chisel, which previously lacked its own appearance):
You can find the traveling trader sitting outside the entry to the HQ, [.....]
We continue moving upwards across the first Tai Ming, stopping at this little 'entryway' to the top most part of the area:
Here we need to destroy both statues and the wooden decorations! The right statue needs to turn into a pile of rocks that is movable as well, since you can move the statue in the past as indicated by the ground above.
Well, on to the job!
And here's the result, after everything has been properly demolished:
And with [.....]
This week, we'll begin with a portrait! This guy is a traveling merchant from the Merchant Isles (who would have guessed?), and he'll sell you new gear at the festival, in case you're in need of an upgrade to beat those pesky Black Ferrets!
Line Art
Color Blocking
Shadows
Highlights & Details
Finished Sprite
GIF!
[.....]
Moving upwards across this first Tai Ming zone, it's time to get to work on the garden, which also has fallen into neglect over the years. I won't change things around here too much though, as we need the space for you to actually fight some enemies as well!
I'm thinking of maybe editing the trees a bit more in the future, perhaps having them lose all their leaves or something to make them look more different. We'll see!
[.....]
It's a new day, but I'm afraid to say that sleep is still elusive here in my den! However, this time I think I managed to record everything, so no mishaps this time (that I know of at least)!!
In this part of my journey to destroy the first Tai Ming map, I'm doing a bunch of different fixes! Adding more grass, for one. A ton of more grass. Heck, I bet almost half this video is me painting grass! But I also destroyed the entrance to [.....]
Teddy is finally back, so it's time to start patching! Patch should go live sometime today, if it hasn't already, so fresh in Frontline is a bunch of side quests and activities in Mount Bloom..... Can you find them all?
If you want to know how many to look for: there are two new rooms with challenges which aren't triggered by quests - you can do them by simply walking into them and uh... solving what appears before you.
There are also three [.....]
Tomorrow it's time for a new patch, and today as we went through the content adding last-minute patching we added a few things!
First up, an Angler Fish hat, as a reward for getting all the Mount Bloom fishes:
Remember the "crossroads" room I posted a while back? This is what it looks (looked!) like:
And now, it looks like this:
The reason for this change is that the transition to the next map ended up looking a little weird when [.....]
Our first task after moving on from the barracks is the cute little cottage to the northeast! After many, many years of neglect, I'm afraid this house is nothing but a shell of its former glory... :(
Unfortunately, I somehow failed to record part of creating the upper rocks of the house. Maybe I should actually try to get some more sleep one of these days, before I accidentally do something worse than forgetting to press 'record' XD
[.....]
Since we're officially done with the Tai Ming barracks for now, I thought I'd throw in something completely different to end the week!
Here's me using the quick and dirty paintover way of turning one portrait into a new one, featuring the second of the priest's apprentices, which we took a look at like.. a couple of months ago? In fact, I made this portrait a couple of months ago as well, but I never got around to posting it as finishing up Mount Bloom and showing [.....]
In this fourth and final part of demolishing the area surrounding the barracks, I make a bunch of holes in the roof, crush the Grindea statue and add a ton off moss to pretty much everything! After this I think it's finally time to move away from the barracks and onwards across the map!
[.....]
Today (actually about 2 weeks ago by the time this is posted! I had it delayed a bit to show some more Mount Bloom stuff!) we spent a grand total of 7 hours sketching the second time travel area, as well as deciding where and how everything was gonna happen, including another step of the main quest we hadn't yet decided on when we had the other meeting last week.
An Early Sketch
Let me tell you, designing this area has been an instant headache! You [.....]
Sleep is wonderful! Sometimes, however, it's also very elusive. One of these nights when I wasn't able to sleep, I figured I might as well get up and record something. So this is what I ended up with: continuing to work on the present transformation of the first Time Travel zone!
In this video I'm mostly focusing on adding a few more colliders to keep you trapped in the middle with your enemy. Despite being unable to sleep I was still super tired so I [.....]
Remember where we left off with this map last week? Well, here's the continuation!
I tried to keep this video a bit shorter than the previous one, to mix things up a bit. I don't know how many of you actually watch the videos, or how many of you have the stamina to sit though a whole 6-minute long one... So I thought I'd make 'em in different lengths in hopes of not boring everyone, hah!
Anyway, in this post I focus on color corrections, [.....]
Time to start something I've been waiting on doing for several months, actually!
It's finally time to start demolishing the time travel zone's past lively village and turn it into it's ruined and overgrown state in the present. This will probably take a ton of posts, as I try to paint as much as possible by hand to give it the proper organic feel and I also don't want the videos to turn several hours long even at x30+ speed... :D
Anyway! First, let's take a [.....]
After making the new Grindea statue the other day, I wanted to compare it to the older one, the one you can find here and there across the world of Grindea. And to be honest, I was quite shocked!
I knew I had improved a bit as an artist since I made the old version, but I never realized exactly how different they would end up being! Since I really like the new version a lot better, I thought maybe I could use that as a [.....]
Last week, as I was working on improving the first zone, I thought about something. In the corner of the map, there's this little statue, where a priest and his apprentices will be praying:
Well, since I made that statue, it has been reused at several other places due to it's neat tiny size, which means it's not really that special anymore, but more of a common decorative piece. And I thought that seemed kind of boring.
So! I decided to make a new, grander [.....]
Time for another mixed bag! In this one, it's time to do some minor fixes to stuff that looked weird!
First up, the Caveling village:
It's a little bit empty, wouldn't you say? Not a lot of breakables or greenery here compared to the rest of the Mount Bloom maps. So, it's definitely time to add some more:
Second, ever notice something strange with the Caveling portraits? Well, I did...
There's a lot of green dots outside of their ears! Ick! [.....]
Cheers!
