Vilya's Workblog

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!)

As you know by now, I have this grand plan of improving the in-game menu! The next part of that plan involves the Equipment tab, which looks totally drab right now:

At the very least, I wanted some decorative art for the titles, as well as fancier texts! As I worked on that, though, I also figured that a dash of background decorations would probably help this tab along a bit as well:

The actual title texts will be rendered in the game engine, so it'll be possible to translate them. As such, they might not look exactly like this, but the color and style should be approx. the same! Also, the icons on the left and right side of the Gear and Style titles will be 'loose', so if certain languages use a longer name for 'gear', the icons will keep the same distance from the text, instead of having the text pass over 'em.

Now, time for me to head over to Fred's place! We're gonna have a looong meeting where we'll discuss what I should make next for the temple (yay!), some final details on the Gold charge skills, and what Support skills we want in the game. Also a good time to eat some yummy BBQ food, since it's summer and all!

Aside from the obvious issues with the actual hairstyle sprites, I've also been incredibly underwhelmed with the color options we currently have in the game. This is an issue with the clothes as well (and that will be fixed at some point too), but it has mainly bugged me when it comes to the haircolors.

Basically I felt that meny of the palettes were made with little to no thought of how it'd actually look on the character, and more of a "well I guess color x should have 3 options as well". A lot of the color options were really similar, and many had really dull and non-vibrant colors as a result of bad recolor work.

So, I went over those as well! And here's the result, featuring all the different hairstyles at least once:

Some of these palettes may not look super different next to eachother, but that's mainly because of the different hairstyles. There will be a bigger difference between one color and the next when actually using the same hairstyle, the reason for this being that some hairstyles use a greater number of bright (or dark) pixels, making the overall color look brighter(or darker) than it would have on another style.

Hope you like these new looks! :)

Time for the male haircuts to get reworked! Basically, it's all the same as with the female hairstyles: fixing issues with missing pixels and cleaning the shading up a bit, trying to make it less messy.

Old Version:

Reworked Version:

Also, yes, I tagged these posts as being 'Equipment & Drops' mainly cause that's how we've classified the hairstyles in our systems... They're actually in the same folder as hats and facegears!

Now, you might think this would be the last part of reworking the haircuts but oh no... There's more action tomorrow, this time featuring palette edits! :D

Oh yes, more reworks! This time, the haircuts. These things have had a bunch of problems, actually, and fixing them has been on my to-do list for quite some time.

The perhaps most glaring issue with the old haircuts were that some of them are downright faulty: some pixels missing here and there, allowing skintone pixels to shine through... So yeah, not very good. Also, the quality of the pixel art wasn't exactly super high, given that they were (also) among the first things I made for the game.

So, I basically just went over each and every one of the hairstyles, fixing problems and reshading them as I went. Here's the first batch, featuring the female versions!

Old Version:

Reworked Version:

Some of them might have a shade or two too many, but overall I think they are a lot better, especially in terms of understanding what the hair is actually doing.

Tomorrow, it's time for the male versions!

Alright, back to reworking the menu! This time around, I'm working on the entire left side of the menu, trying to tie things together. In doing so, we have a bunch of options, and I'm not quite sure which one I like best.

What do you guys think?

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

Option 4

Option 5

Do you like the more simply and airy ones, like option 4-5, or the more graphics heavy 1-3? Less is more, or more is more? It's a tough question!

Another bunch of small things, that are now live in the frontline beta as of yesterday!

1. The Arcade Mode achievements for Temple of Seasons (which I previously showed here) have been changed from showing a winter room to an autumn room. The reason for this is simply because we wanted a bigger difference between the appearance of Temple of Seasons and the Seasonne (winterland) achievements.

2. You can now unlock the achievement for fishing all the Winterland fishes :D

3. When opening the menu, you typically see your character in the character box to the left, against a background representing the area you're currently in. Previously both Evergrind City and the Collector's HQ lacked such a background, leading the character box to show you as being in the Pumpkin Woods inside the HQ.. Now, that has been fixed!

4. I made a slight change to the Snowbacca hat, having it go down a bit further in the back. Perhaps a matter of taste, but I think overall I like the new look better.

5. There are now 3 new items (aside from the hats) that can be gained from unlocking achievements in Arcade Mode! First, there's a trinket that gives you semi-visibility, like a ghost. Then there's an item summoning a fae that follows you around, like Naniva in the story mode. And last, you can get a taming item that allows you to tame bees!

I had the drop appearances for these three items uploaded, but unfortunately we decided to change the look of them last-minute so you'll have to do without them for now.. :D

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