Time to create the first version of another room!

The original sketch

Some basics: walls, floors & doors 

Starting to add the water

Refining the edges & depth

Adding some grassy edges~

Almost there!

Sketching out some trees~

Refining the sketch, turning it into line art

Adding basic colors

Refining the colors & tree trunks!

Adding leaves and grass around the trees

Done for now!

Later this week I'll get back to this room and add some leaves around the floor, stay tuned for that!

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In the last post I showed you what the Lobby will look like once it's completed:

Thanks to MrChocodemon over on the forums, we got some suggestions on how to improve this room, some of which we'll definitely implement in a coming update.

You should all feel free to add to his list of suggestions, either here or on the forums! We do appreciate all feedback as we want the game to be as good as it can possibly be :)

In the meanwhile, let's take a look at what the Summer- and Winter versions of the lobby look like right now:

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Time to move on to one of the most important rooms of the dungeon: the lobby! This room will have all the seasons, and will serve as the connection point for many of the different parts of the dungeon.

Let's go!

The basic sketch, showing where everything should be and how big each prop should approx. be!

Laying down the basics: walls & doors.

Adding some of the pre-made props.

Starting on the center piece: the statue!

Step 1: Rough sketch

Step 2: Refining the line art

Step 3: Blocking the basic shades

Step 4: Refining and enhancing shadows & light

Step 5: Adding details, adjusting proportions, finalizing stuff!

...and here's the room in its finalized "glory"..! As usual, obstacles will be added by Fred later on :)

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Certain things, such as trees, would be a bit annoying to add to the game one by one in Photoshop, as it doesn't allow sorting depending on which layer is closest to the 'camera'.

To make this easier, Teddy has made a 'tree editor', which allows us to put trees into the game with automatic sorting. This makes sure we can move the trees around without manually adjusting which layer should be on top. When creating forests with a lot of trees, it saves us a lot of pain and hard work!

Above is the base we have to work with: the summer version of the previous room, without trees.

Here's our editor! In the drop down menu to the left, we can select sets of props depending on which area they belong to. We use this tool not only for trees, but for a lot of other props as well. Crates, pots, bushes, rocks and tree stumps are all added using this tool!

Adding the trees is very straight forward. We simply select the trees we'd like to use, and it will pick randomly between the selected ones. It's also possible to have the trees flip randomly. One click puts out one tree, so we simply click around where we want them to appear. Once we're done and want to change where certain trees area places, it's possibly to select one or multiple trees and drag them around until we're satisfied with their positioning. 

Another great thing about the editor now that we're working with the Temple of Seasons is that we only need to put the trees out once. The editor saves the position of the trees and allows us to change what trees appear, while they remain in the same position, so changing between summer- autumn- and winter trees is a piece of cake! (Sadly, though, this sprite-swapping feature works only in the game engine, so when I show you mockups like these, the trees will have different positions depending on what season it is, since I'm putting them in manually in order for you to get the correct idea of what the area will look like.) 

That's all about this editor, I think! On to new adventures!

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It's time to change this room from autumn to the other seasons of the temple! The procedure is pretty much the same as before: adjusting Hue/Saturation and redecorating the rooms accordingly.

Above is the finished autumn room, for your reference. In the end, there will be a waterfall over the middle door, some bushes over the left door and another obstacle blocking the door leading to the right, but that's stuff that Fred will add later on!

The summer version of the room is pretty straight forward: hues of green replace hues of orange, flowers are added.

For the Winter room, however, we need to create some new trees, as we haven't made a winter room before! We decided that to make the rooms interesting we'd have two different types of trees during winter: trees without leaves and trees that still have their leaves, but are covered in snow:

Editing the edges of the winter room takes a little bit of time, as there shouldn't be any grassy edges, just smooth snow. In the end, we decorate the floor with 'winter-y flowers', the same that appear in the winter areas around the Temple of Seasons. 

Just a note: keep in mind that while all the orbs are green in these screenshots, in the actual game they will have different colors depending on which season they change the room into! The water will probably also be frozen in the winter version of the rooms, but we save details like that for later :)

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Time for another room! This one will need 3 different iterations: autumn, summer and winter. Just like the previous room, however, we'll start with the autumn version.

Here's the very basic sketch of what this room will look like:

As always, there's nothing too fancy, just some vague line art showing where things should be. There will be three orbs in the room, and three different obstacles each orb will affect in some way. The obstacles will be animated by Fred, so I'll leave them out for now.

Just like last time, I start out with the very basics, walls and floor:

Moving on, I start working on some basic props, such as the doors. The previous room only had  exits facing downwards, while this one has no less than three exits that will be more visible to the player:

Now it's time to add the trees and season changing orbs. As you can see, I changed their location somewhat if you compare this image to the early sketch. We kind of figured that this version was more balanced and gave us more room to include greenery:

Finally, I start adding the details. There's grass, softer edges around the walls, some hanging vines from the wall... Just the small things that give the room a bit more life:

My part of making this autumn room is officially done! Now it's up to Fred to add the three obstacles, while I move on to making the Summer and Winter versions of the room. :)

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I'm back from my parents, and today's my birthday! Wohoo! To celebrate, let's turn that autumn room into its summer version ;)

When doing this, I will again use a lot of Photoshop's hue/saturation adjustment feature on already finished assets, as it saves a lot of time when you want to keep areas looking kind of similar. But let's jump into it!

As a reminder, this is what the Autumn room looks like in it's finished version!

I start the transformation by changing the color of the grass and the very basic greenery!

Moving on the adjusting the bushes and trees... :)

Giving those dead bushes some leaves and working on the vines.

To finalize things, I add a bunch of flowers here and there :)

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