Meanwhile, Fred's been working on more Bishop stuff and some new player animations, one which can be seen here:
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And here's some more new stuff, featuring bigger versions of the catalysts, new backgrounds for the temple of seasons character and enemy codex, a new set of stairs in the Port Monnaie church, and a slight edit of the Startington grave:
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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:
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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, [.....]
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 [.....]
In Fred's department meanwhile, it's all about Bishop and giving him more animations! Let's have a look:
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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 [.....]
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 [.....]
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 [.....]
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 [.....]
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 [.....]
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 [.....]
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! :)
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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 [.....]
In Fred's department, it's all about giving Bishop some more weaponry! Scared yet?
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You know what, said and done, time to touch up these old UI graphics a little bit:
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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)! [.....]
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 [.....]
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 [.....]
