As for Fred, he's been busy potting a lot of plants! Here you can see a whole bunch of them in their housing forms, including a jumpkin for which I haven't made a proper pot yet:
[.....]
Next we have another portrait, of another of the veteran collectors we're adding:
[.....]
And today we're taking a look at the new interface where you'll be able to choose which of your seeds to plant! Going for a pretty minimalistic and streamlined design here, this interface will only show the seed, how much it costs to pot it, what sort of pot and plant it'll result in and how much money you have! I made two versions of this interface, one with static colours which you can see above, and one where the colours are different for each seed, seen here below:
And [.....]
On to the next mission, making drop appearances for each of the potted plants! First batch here:
[.....]
Meanwhile in Fred's department, we see a sneak peek of a couple new things for the stable update: a couple shields, a sprout, and an idle animation for one of the veteran collectors:
[.....]
Now that we've been back a while and gotten back into the groove of working, we thought it was high time to have a meeting about what we're gonna do the next bunch of weeks! As you know, the frontline patch has been released and we're currently working on stuff for the stable version of the same. As such we went over what things will be added, and had a few unexpected ones added to the list as well!
First up, as mentioned before, we'll add a book series by Penn Wrythe, that you'll find parts of throughout the game. The final part will only be written after you've answered a couple questions asked by the writer herself, meaning [.....]
And now, back to doing something I haven't done in a little while, which is a new portrait! This is for one of the new older generation collectors you'll find in the HQ at some point:
[.....]
Next up, time to make some more potted plants! Without further ado:
And here we have the full lineup, both with and without the actual plants:
We'll also add some kind of sprout to these for when you've planted a seed and it's starting to grow, at which point examining it will give you an estimate of how far off it is from turning into an actual plant! [.....]
Now, time to get back to work and what better way to start off a new work week after a week's holiday than to make the first pieces of a whole new system? These seeds (appropriately enough, since it's spring time over here and I just spent pretty much the entire vacation outside managing the garden) will drop from all the greenery inspired enemies in the game, letting you plant them in your own home! Let's take a look:
I've also made all the preparations for the first such [.....]
(Sorry for pinging you guys with a rather empty post, but I thought I'd just let you know, in case any of you wondered why there hasn't been any new updates this week, we'll be taking a week off from work since we didn't get any time off during easter in anticipation of this patch! I could have sworn I mentioned it when I wrote the last post, but we only decided on taking this time off very close to when we patched so I must have forgotten to add it in!
Anyways, the blog will be back as usual on the 19th! Sorry again for not letting you know sooner, thanks for understanding :3) [.....]
And today's patch time! Now go forth dear friends and try out the new patch over on the frontline beta! Among the new stuff is:
* Three big but optional side "quests"/objectives has been added, you can find them in the lost ship, Pillar Mountains and Mt Bloom respectively
* You can now refight all bosses in the arena, which has been improved in terms of UI and has a few more challenges as well
* A new load screen and splash screen for everyone who has been working on the game; the game should also load more quickly
* More bosses have drops (if you've killed them already you have been awarded the drops retroactively as all boss drops are now [.....]
Doing things a little different today, since tomorrow will be patching day! So here's a little early sneak peek of three new collectors that will appear in the collector's HQ or around the world, featuring a few more veterans, since we felt like the collectors all seemed awfully young:
[.....]
Since we decided to make a bunch of new boss drops as well, I better get to work making those! Here's a Power Flower seed, an Evil Eye Mask, and a Thorn Worm cap:
I also went ahead and made the drop appearance of the power flower seed all grown up for its place in the housing system, although you won't be able to use it just yet (next update, maybe!)
Finally I was a bit cheeky and made my own suggestion for what the Toy Factory's shield drop could [.....]
Now, time for some last minute additions, starting with the final arena award, the arena hat:
Adding some backgrounds for Bishop in the journal, as well as a background for your character when they're in Bishop's own little realm:
Here's something that won't appear in this next patch, but is important to start working on anyway, namely our continued rework of the menu! In this step you'll see me making a new layout where we're removing the text titles of each inventory category and replacing them with icons (although the [.....]
Now that the month has drawn to a close, it's time to do a quick recap of what's left for this patch, especially what we want to add to frontline and what we'll save for stable - so it was high time for another meeting! One of the things we've been talking about has been the boss drops. Right now only a few early bosses have boss drops, which aren't even dropped 100% of the time, which is a bit weird even now that we've added boss rebattles in the arena. We had two options for this - either remove the boss drops altogether or let the boss drops be at 100% and add some more to other [.....]
Meanwhile, Fred is working on adding and animating some new NPCs, namely the priest and apprentice that will appear in the church in Port Monnaie, as well as giving Bokus the ability to read and turn the pages of his book:
[.....]
Now, some of these things are a bit placeholder-y, one of them being the fonts and overall design of the texts used. For example, I'm not too fond of the readability in the sound design teams part of the load screen, with it being on two rows and a bit hard to read overall:
So I made a couple suggestions making it look a bit more streamlined and less in your face:
For the cloudy load screen part, there was a bit of a font issue as well. Here's what [.....]
