Vilya's Workblog: Workflow

Speaking of the future polish stage, I thought it's time to take a look at what's ahead of us. We're actually very close to the end, believe it or not (though "very close" in this case likely means dev time for quite a while yet).

In terms of what we have left story wise, we're talking one more regular dungeon (the ghost ship, which you've already seen a bit of), and then a special dungeon to tie it all together: a dungeon that will be a combination of all the previous dungeons made into one.

Our ideas for the final dungeon are varied, but one of the key parts is that we will be reusing previous enemies, but add a twist: they will be improved versions, not only stronger but likely also having one or more new attacks. There will also be mixed enemies from various parts of the game.

Our goal with this final dungeon is to bring all the parts of the game together, so there will be a little bit of everything, both in terms of enemies and areas, but also characters you've met and interacted with throughout the game. Because we'll in part reuse enemies and area graphics, we hope it won't take as crazily long to make compared to the other dungeons - but on the other hand a final dungeon needs a certain level of epicness, so, well...

But what about after this final dungeon, what then? As you know if you've been following this blog, we've talked a lot about adding things to each part of the game before we actually call it a day and release it as 1.0. That of course entrails more sidequests and the added story scenes I've been talking about before, but our "wishlist" for what we'd love to add is huge and it will probably be impossible to add everything - but one can hope.

Here's a few things from our list (note that these are some things we wish to add; it doesn't necessarily mean we will add them - it kind of depends on how long we think it'll take and how we feel about these things at the end - and there are plenty more, as well):

We'd like to have more dialogues and other such things about the 'gaming' aspect of the world. In certain areas there's already parts where scientists have investigated things such as card drops and the science behind some things in the game, but we'd like to add even more. We're talking things such as people talking about them having leveled up or unlocked new skills, someone talking about a rare drop they found, people commenting on how OP some combos are, and so on.

Some random UI improvements:
* An indicator for when someone is typing in the chat (such as a speech bubble with a pen or something, simply to show people why you're standing still but aren't in the menu)
* Add an indicator on players with low health (such as a red circle beneath a character beneath a certain hp %)
* A progress bar for Trophies

We'd like to add Collector NPCs out in the fields as well - it can feel kind of empty right now, and it'd be cool to see Collectors out there doing what they do best: collecting things!

Lots of more arena challenges, including PVP.

More mini-games and other optional content, such as a quiz-like thing in the library (which also needs to get implemented, of course), a tower of block puzzles near Mount Bloom (you've probably already seen the exterior of the building).

Some kind of mechanic that gives you a Collector rank based on how many items you have, or something similar - basically give collecting some meaning! Right now the whole Collector thing isn't really used much mechanics wise (or even story wise), and we'd like to improve on that.

Are there any such things you'd like to see in the game before the 1.0 release? Let us know and who knows what might make it into the game! :)

One thing we've been working on recently is creating a suitable effect for an upcoming battle! For this blog post, I thought it'd be fun to take a look at our iteration progress as we implement and improve upon an idea!

Sometimes you learn a new way of doing something that makes your life so much easier, and you really wish you knew about it earlier. For me, this is the case with Photoshop all the time (there are so many ways of doing the same thing!!), but even more so lately.

It began with me looking for an easier way of adding more than one image into the same PSD-file. Earlier, when adding multiple artworks to the same image, opened each file in Photoshop and copy-pasted them all, one by one, into the same document. I just figured there had to be an easier way of doing that - and boy, was I right.

Surprised by how much easier it could be, I was encouraged to look for similar solutions to other annoying things in Photoshop. In the end, I had managed to reduce the time it took for me to create a progress GIF by probably 90%, I'm not even kidding.

SO, in case anyone else is interested in this, and happen to not know about these things, here's how I do it now:

Preparing the Steps

In order to make a GIF of the steps, I first need to actually make the image and save snapshots of my progress. Now, I have heard that later versions of Photoshop might have add-ons for this, but I still use CS5 and since I'm really attached to it I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.

So, instead of having some fancy program saving snapshots for me, I've saved each step manually as a PNG or JPG. And yes, that includes the entire Save-As process, where you have to manually set the file format and name the file every single time.

Well, after some searching, I found a script written by a guy at this forum, which basically allows you to save a JPG automatically when running the script. So, I saved his script to my CS5 scripts folder and assigned a shortcut for it:

Changing a few lines can turn it into a Save-as-PNG scrips as well!

So now, whenever I press ctrl+ä och ctrl+ö (cause I'm a Swede.. ;)) I'll get a snapshot of whatever I'm working on in the same folder as the Photoshop file. I just gotta remember to press the shortcut every once in a while, when I feel it's time to add another frame to a future progress GIF!

Adding the Steps to a Single Document

Now that the steps, or rather, the images that will become frames in our GIF are ready, it's time to load them all into a document. At the same time. Not opening every file one by one and then copy-pasting each of them for like 15 minutes, please!

Okay. So this is built into Photoshop CS5 and I'm sure everyone already knew about it except me. If you look at that list of scripts above, a few scripts above the Save As JPG/PNG scripts is one called "Load Files into Stack". Activate it, select your files and - you guessed it. They all get added to the same file, in order of name.

So with just a few clicks I can now add aaaall the frames I need instead of going through them all manually for hours and hours in total. Can you imagine how stupid I felt when I realized this? Man. If only I had known...!

Making the Animation

Now, Photoshop isn't the best thing out there when you're making regular animations, I'm pretty sure most people agree on that. Making progress GIF animations is something it can do really easily though, especially when you know where to look.

So, you've loaded all your steps into a single file using the Load into Stack script. Now, in order to turn them into a GIF which shows each frame for however long you want, you need to bring up the Animation windows from the Window menu at the top:

Then click the little square in the top right corner of that window to bring up a menu of things you can do - one which is "Make Frames from Layers". This will instantly add each of your steps as a frame in the animation window. If they appear in the wrong order, just click "Reverse Frames" in the same menu!

Now you can set how long you want each frame to be visible. I tend to use somewhere between 0,5 to 1 second for each frame except the last, which I usually keep up for 3-4 seconds. You can hit the play button on the Animation window to give it a test run and see what works for you.

Once you're done, you can just save the whole thing as a GIF, and you're done!

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That's it, guys!! If you have any other (or better?!) Photoshop tips & tricks, feel free to tell me about them! I'm astonished by how much I can still learn about this program despite having used it for years, and I don't intent to stop learning now :)

Well, today was an interesting day! We woke up to the freezer having opened mysteriously during the night, which meant basically all our food had thawed. Fun times spending a few hours throwing our frozen meals and evening snacks, then cleaning up the whole thing and getting a ton of new food! Oh well, the show must go on...!

The first Tai Ming zone is more or less completed for now (at least until Teddy gets his hand on it, after that I might edit a few things - we'll see). Instead, we're turning our eyes to the second map! As we ran though the map one more time before I started working on it, we decided to fix a few things:

For one, we wanted to change the greenery area outside the HQ to sand. This isn't really important in this sketch, as I haven't even started making the graphics yet, but it's good for me to remember.

As you can see above, we also moved the white/pink oval shape from the left corner to the middle of the right side. The oval shape actually indicates a portal to the present, and we made the move as we wanted the corresponding area in the past to be a bit longer:

Basically we wanted more room for fighting. Which is the theme for another edit at the bottom of the map:

Here we also wanted more room for fighting, as the entry area felt a bit small, especially if you're a party of 4 players :)

After finishing up the props for the editor I really felt like some stuff was missing from the area as well, and decided to throw together another kind of tree to put here and there:

This tree will be added to the editor as well, so I'll get a screen of the trees in action once Teddy has started working on getting them in. Speaking of Teddy, here's a sneak peek of what he's currently working on:

Yeah, that's right! It's the boss! Coming soon to a ruined village near you... ;)

Now that all the layers and items have been properly sorted, it's time to get things ready for the editor!

What this typically entails is typically very straight forward copying the item you wanna have in the editor, paste it in a new document and save it by itself, give it a neat name and you're done (since Teddy handles the colliders and such).

When it comes to Tai Ming and the time travel function though, things are a bit different since you have two sets of items that are kind of similar but need to change color (and sometimes size), depending on if you're in the past or the present. For example, the small plants will become medium sized, and the medium plants will become big as you travel from the past into the present.

So, what we'll do when adding things to the editor we're gonna add stuff to the Past map as usual, but instead of adding the items all over again, putting them exactly where they were, we'll make the game engine swap the small maps for the medium ones (etc). So, when I'm gonna add things to the Present map, I'll have to use a png version of the items that we already placed, so I know which ones will be there already, and add things around them as needed.

That means the previews for the past version is probably gonna look a bit off, with items that are small when they would be big (as I'm using a png of the Past objects rather than the Present ones they are transformed into by the game engine), but then again, I could probably just wing it and add some random stuff in an extra document in order to make the previews look a bit better. We'll see!

Anyway, here are a bunch of the props you'll see in the Past and Present (ignore the stray gray pixels, I accidentally added those when I made this preview):

Time to do all the stuff I wrote about yesterday, one more time! This time it's for the past version of the first Tai Ming map, which luckily for me doesn't have quite as many random props due to the villagers keeping things neat and tidy:

As such, this map doesn't have quite as many random layers as well, "only" 316 in total:

Thankfully I can reuse a few things from my work yesterday: for one, I don't have to remake the overlay layers, since the mountain walls are the exact same both in the past and the present (I knew it was a good idea to have this village in the mountains)!

However, for the most part, it's back to going through every single layer and deciding if it needs to be merged with something else, if anything on it needs to be separated unto its own layer, if it needs to be renamed, and where to move it within the new folder system. A few hours of this and you're definitely ready to swear you'll never create a mess such as this ever again, believe me!

One thing I didn't mention too much yesterday was how messed up certain things become when you move them around. For instance, in this map, when I was going to organize the "floor" layers, I had several different layers with different floor details, such as the paths, the edges along the water, etc. Now, what I'd like to do is merge and move layers around so I have one layer for the path, one layer for the water edges, and one for the water itself.

However, what I didn't realize was that I had painted both the water edges and some of the path on the same layer, which meant that no matter how I moved the layers around, things always ended up looking weird.

In this case, the best solution was to manually remove the excess paint that was overlapping the other layers, which meant I had to do some repainting. This happened every now and then, but usually I managed to keep the problem areas looking more or less the same as they had before merging and organizing the layers, so it's OK (even though it could have been 100% avoided by not being this messy when creating the files in the first place)!

Finally, after another bunch of hours at this, I'm finally done and I believe Teddy will have a much easier time making his way through these documents now! Perhaps they will even be easier to understand than the Mount Bloom maps, which already were a lot cleaner than maps used to be back in the days :)

Now that we've completed the destruction of the first Tai Ming zone, it's time to get both the destroyed version and the ancient village version ready for implementation!

I first started working on this map a long, long time ago before we had any proper folder systems or anything in place that would make things easier when adding the backgrounds to the game. Hell, I don't even know if we had any routine of using the map editor which allows us to put the plants and other non-unique items with colliders into it easily.

As a result, this map is a mess. There are so many unnecessary layers, and certain items are divided over several layers that aren't even next to each other. For Teddy, whose job it is to implement the maps, it can be a real headache to figure out which layer contains what, especially since I don't always give the layers obvious names.

So I thought I'd just quickly go through the map and merge a few layers here and there and give them their proper names. Only..........

359 layers?! Oh dear, this is worse than I thought. 359 layers divided over like 20 different folder, where next to nothing has a proper name and the same item can be both on layer 2 and on layer 256, depending on whether I edited it in the last couple of weeks or if it's the same as it was way back. Oh my....

When this happens, there's really only one solution. You have to organize it. It's gonna be boring, and it's gonna take a lot of time, but giving this over to Teddy to figure it out best he can simply isn't an option (though I'd probably get some kind of award for most evil colleague ever)!

When I made the 5 billion Mount Bloom maps recently, we kind of developed a folder/layer system that worked well for us. Using that as a base I made this template that I'll be using from now on when I create a new area:

Basically, you have the base floor color and any floor decorations that don't need colliders in the bottom folder (properly named, this time, of course).

Then there's the walls, and wall decorations that either don't need colliders of their own, or that will be an extension of the wall.

Above that is the Props folder where all the items that you can't simply pass through will be. This is the most important folder for Teddy, who will have to implement all of these items manually - either directly into the game engine or by adding them to the editor first.

Lastly, there's the "overlay" folder, which will contain parts of the walls that need to appear above both the props and the player, to create a feeling of depth. As I went through the 359 layers manually, mergin, dividing and/or adding them to the corresponding folder, you'd notice that the props would go over the walls in a lot of places:

Having the walls that will be above everything in their own folder on top fixes these issues, and as you roam through the map it'll look better if your character appears below the wall, giving the illusion it's actually a mountain wall you can bass beneath and not just a flat image:

Of course, using this folder system messes with the sorting of certain props. If you don't want 200 layers with one item on each, some of them will appear above other things that they shouldn't:

This will be fixed once we've prepared the items and added them properly through the editor, though, so there's no reason to be worried, though it makes for awkward looking screenshots, haha! You guys would probably think I'd gone mad if I posted the above one, saying it's 100% finished ;)

Anyway, after x hours of going through these layers from hell, we finally have a folder system that's a lot easier to navigate! Wohooo!

...Now I just need to repeat the same thing for the past village version....... Here's to hoping doesn't have quite as many stray layers!

Now that all the greenery is in place in Mt. Bloom, it's time to make sure the sprites are sorted correctly. For those of you unfamiliar with that stuff, it means that we need to place the sprites in a way so that if your character, for instance, is standing in front of a mushroom, he or she will also appear in front of it rather than have it floating on top of him/her, which can happen if they're sorted the wrong way.

This is done by putting each of the sprites onto the map with our editor tool! Sometimes I use this tool from the beginning, leaving areas where trees and other decorative things would normally be blank, only to add them with the editor once everything else is done. This time, however, the sprites needed hadn't been added to the editor yet, so instead I added them temporarily with Photoshop.

So, what I need to do now is to lower the transparency of the layer with all the decorative things, and add the correct sprites on top of them with the editor instead:

It takes a bit of time, and in hindsight I probably should have just waited for the sprites to be added to the editor rather than putting them there with Photoshop first. Oh well!

Next up, we're playing around with adding stone tablets with arrows pointing to nearby doorways, to make it a bit more clear that there's a door there and not just another wall. We're also considering adding a light effect around the doors, at least those facing left, right, and down, as they are the ones that are easily mistaken for walls. Obviously this doesn't make logical sense for doors that don't lead outside, as there wouldn't be any light source causing it, but if it helps make it clear where the doorways are, it could probably be worth is despite that lack of logic.

Anyway, here are the stone tablets:

And here's what one of them could look like next to a door:

Next up, I decided to add some more details to the bridge from the other day:

I made the actual bridge a bit longer on one side, added more details to the rocks, and a little bit of greenery on and around the statues!

Lastly, as some of you noticed, the stone cutter finished her work with the Rabby statue outside the HQ during the festival, only she started working on it again once the festival ended?! This of course needs to be fixed, she can't be allowed to work on an already finished project!

Instead, she'll be resting in town, expressing her disappointment with the pricing in Belmont's café, which explains her less happy new expression:

Next up, I have both a ton of backgrounds, but also quite a few portraits to make! Gonna be hard to decide what to do first :D

Something I'm trying to become better at is planning what to do next & preparing for it properly. At times, I simply wake up, look at my tasklist, pick something and start working with minimal preparations. Sometimes this works well, sometimes my work tends to get a bit uninspired.

Recently I've found that taking a break from the computer screen and sketching in a notebook helps a lot with my workflow. For some reason it feels much easier sketching freely and try out random ideas when it's 'just' a notebook, rather than when you've created a Photoshop document for the specific task. Afterwards, I have a clear idea of what I want to create and often it ends up looking better because I took some time sketching multiple versions.

So, what have I been sketching recently? Hats, Hats & Hats! Here's a small selection of hats that may (or may not) appear in the future:

Super detailed, right? ;) Well what matters is that it gives me an idea of what to create next, digitally! To end this post, here's a quick sketch of a new portrait as well:

Did I ever talk about the semi-new system we have for bug reports? Basically, I'm now adding every single bug reported on the forums to a huge spreadsheet shared with Teddy & Fred, where I give it a title, description, link to the thread and priority (High, Medium or Low) which indicates how severe the bug is.

As it turns out, going on a week-long riding camp means there'll be a lot of bugs to add to the spreadsheet once you get back... Thankfully I saved new reports in a bookmarks folder every other evening before collapsing into bed, so at least I had them all in one place!

In the end, no less than 45 new bugs where reported and added to the list, whew! I gotta say though, if it takes this long adding them to a list & naming them, imagine actually solving them all - poor Teddy! :D

Anyways, I finished up the day with some other small stuff. Here's the pet feeding menu's "mana" changed into "energy", as that's the term we use everywhere else:

I also went over the Steam Achievement icons which had black bars, removing them o make them look a bit better (just a few shown below):

Finally, I went ahead and updated the website graphics. Now the new promo-art characters are there rather than the old crappy ones:

As I write this, Teddy is sitting next to me working on a new, improved version of the translation tool! I believe we've mentioned this a few times before in various places, but haven't gone into detail..

So, the new translation tool will have full Steam Workshop support, which means it'll be easier to create and manage translations - no more zipping and uploading through the forums, wohoo! It'll also be a lot easier to find translations, as it'll be done directly through the game client (and thanks to Steam Workshop, any updates made to the translations will be downloaded automatically).

Of course, browsing translations will need an interface of its own, and that's where I come in. Today me and Teddy sat down and discussed exactly what we need to show in said interface, creating this totally amazing sketch in the process:

I then jumped into Photoshop, creating the actual graphics needed. Here's a mockup, with almost all text missing (and the text that is there is super placeholder made in Photoshop rather than the actual game engine):

Basically, the red squares are placeholders for the icons used by the translation.

The white boxes to the right of the squares are where the translation's title will be displayed, and the "Subscribed" text will only appear on translations you've subscribed to (duh), which means they'll be added next to your English (Default) selection in the game's Options.

Beneath the icons are green and red arrows. These indicate how many upvotes vs downvotes each translation has gotten.

The speech bubble-icon will indicate what percentage of the dialogue has been translated, while the cogwheel next to it will tell you the completion percentage of system texts (interface/menu stuff mostly). We figured we'd separate these as many feel that the dialogues are more important than interface stuff, and having a single % would be misleading in cases where 100% of the dialogue has been translated but 0% of the interface, bringing the overall completion unfairly low.

Since we realize these icons may be a bit unclear on their own, we'll add a description beneath the content box, explaining what the icons mean.

Finally, you'll be able to use search box to filter the translations based on your language, and it'll suggest languages based on what you've written already!

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!)

For those of you who follow my twitter, this comes as no surprise, but we're currently working on implementing Steam leaderboards for Arcade Mode!

So, a few nights ago me and Teddy sat down and discussed what we wanted the interface to look like. To begin with, we listed everything we wanted it to include:

Some of you have wondered how we'll deal with single and multiplayer Arcade Mode runs, and the answer to that is that we'll separate them into four different groups. Basically, there will be a 1p, 2p, 3p, 4p and Local highscore, and when browsing scores you'll swap between those by pressing up or down.

We also wanted you to be able to see the score of your friends as well as where your own highest score is compared to everyone else, so you'll also be able to filter the highscores on those variables, which you do by hitting tab (or select, I believe, on controllers).

Above is a mockup I made of what the interface will look like! The three top scores will feature the player's avatar, and pressing right will fetch another 7 scores for you to view.

We played around with what the ranking numbers should look like, so that's why there's a bunch of random numbers in circles of various sizes in the box to the right.

In the final version, you'll get a reminder of what button does what at the bottom of the screen as well, as with the rest of our menus. :)

I think that's it in terms of these leaderboards for now! Lemme know if you have any questions or suggestions :D

Last week on the Devblog we announced our intentions to finally prepare Secrets of Grindea for a Steam early access release. In order to do so, there's a bunch of stuff to finish, and one of those things is to create suitable promo art that can appear on Steam, which I'll be talking about today!

Planning how to make this piece of promotional art begins with browsing Steam and checking what other gamedevs do while asking yourself questions: Does this artwork catch my attention? Can I guess the game's genre solely based on it's promotional artwork? Are there any in-game graphics present? Add a "why/why not?" at the end of each of them, and keep going! While it's good to stand on your own, you also want to know how others handle stuff like this - for instance, if all Action RPGs use a similar kind of motif, the audience may associate Action RPGs with said imagery, and it might be a good idea to know so you can attract the correct audience.

While browsing, I save certain artworks I find interesting and put them together in a document so I can analyze them more easily and discuss what makes them work (or not) with the others in the team:

The second step is to collect a bunch of images that resemble the feeling I want to portray within our own promo art. These images can be found all over the web, and I won't use any of them for specific reference of anything like that - I just want a collection of images giving off a certain vibe to help me stay on the right track and fuel my inspiration when creating something similar.

For this promo art moodboard, I collected a bunch of bright, happy-looking anime/manga-ish artworks, mostly from Pixiv:

Step three is to put these two boards together in my workspace, and prepare to make a ton of thumbnails:

A thumbnail is basically a super small, sketched version of an image that will give you an idea of what it'll look like in it's finished state. It's great for checking your composition, and should probably always be used before actually making a bigger image.

Here's a bunch of the thumbnails I made (these are very basic, typically thumbs can be as detailed as you like, but for this purpose I stuck with very basic ones):

One of the funny things with thumbnails is that when you start out, you often think your first idea will be the best, and that the rest of the thumbs you come up with will be bad versions of it and/or a waste of time because nothing could be better than the first one that came to your mind. However, more often than not, when you force yourself to come up with more than one version of an image, you'll realize that the one you thought was the best at first may not have been as nice as you thought. And such was definitely the case here!

Now, before I talk about which one we selected and why, I think it's time for a little break - this post is already pretty long, after all!

Prepare for Part 2 later this week~ :)

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 could have painted each and every house, but the amount of time saved from reusing walls and rock textures is pretty huge! And most people wouldn't really notice anyway (and if they did, most wouldn't care).

Remember back in the old SNES days? Almost everything was reused more or less directly! It's pretty amazing what you can 'get away with' when it comes to time and resource saving (if you're making a game and don't want it to take 5 bazillion years, you should probably reuse stuff too) :)

Anyway, this video is but one example of how a single house and two different wall textures can become two new houses with a bunch of copy, paste and minor editing! Enjoy!

Before continuing the work on the Time Travel temple, it's time to do some grunt work. There's one issue in the game currently, most obviously in any room of the Temple of Seasons where you battle winter enemies. Take a look:

Their ice attacks keep overlapping things where they shouldn't! In order to fix this, we need to let the game know where these ice effects (as well as shadows and other effects on the ground) are allowed to appear.

I'm doing this by manually painting on top of the background with any color, covering any part of the floor where the effects are allowed to appear:

Since many of the rooms have multiple floors, there will be separate layers covering each height, so the effects only appear on the floor you're currently on:

This is just one of the rooms, but the same thing has to be done in at least every room that potentially spawn winter enemies, as their ice effects are an extreme eyesore without it!

Ideally, every single room and area would have masks like these to avoid shadows bleeding over unto things where they shouldn't, but usually they aren't as annoying as these ice effects so we'd rather save the manpower for now!

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