Vilya's Workblog

Today I spent some time working on a set of new hats for you guys! These will mainly be rewards for getting achievements in Arcade Mode, as we thought it's a bit boring to only receive Essence for everything:

The Boar Hat
We wanted to try something new, and make hats that make it look like your head actually belongs to an animal. Our inspiration for this was the horse head that often appears everywhere on the internet, but so far we've stuck to animals present in the SoG universe :D

The Pecko Hat
As with the Boar hat, it's part of the animal thingy we tried out with the Boar hat. It may not look super much like a Pecko, but at least it looks like a bird?!

Santa's Beard
Actually we have so many beards already, but we somehow forgot about them or lost them in a bunch of folders... So this is actually like the fourth beard I've made, and it's made to resemble Santa's beard.

Red Slime Hat (Giga Version)
This hat has totally nothing to do with beating Red Giga Slime, nope. ;)

Snowbacca Hat
A regular hat and not a Snowbacca face, sadly (?)! Are you disappointed? Maybe we'll do a big Snowbacca mask for you later on. Or maybe not XD

More menu upgrades! This time, I'm focusing on the skill window, because the headers over there are really old and really ugly:

Not super exciting, right? And again, SO MUCH BROWN! Time to change it up:

And here we have the end result:

My goal with these was for them to look a bit more like the Talent section, and to increase the color variety. Sure, there's still a lot of brown shades, but there's more contrast between them, and there are other colors as well. Also, with the help of the new, fancier headers, I think they look a lot more epic.

Now, you may notice there are some headers missing - I haven't made neither the Passive headers nor the Support ones yet. The reason for that is that we aren't really 100% sure how to proceed with them:

We haven't implemented a single passive yet, and it's likely that we never will, now that we have Talents instead. As for Support skills, we're currently discussing which ones we'd like to have (if we want to keep them at all), and in the end they may not be sorted the way they are now with "Defensive" and "Offensive" types. It all depends on what we come up with.

So, they will have to wait for now. :)

So, you thought we were done with the promo art, right? Nope! It's been a while now, so I thought I'd go over it and make some fixes, as well as prepare the character art to be added to our website.

The characters that currently feature on our website don't really represent the game or what it looks like all that well, while these guys do a lot better. However, we wanted to up the details of both characters a bit.

Here's the girl's old version:

And here's the new one:

Mainly I edited her hair, making it a bit darker. I also did some work on her shirt, thinning the lines and adding a bit of detail. Finally, I edited her mouth a bit, giving her lips. I'm not 100% sure about that change yet, as it changed her expression a bit. However, I don't think it looks worse, necessarily, so I'm definitely a bit torn!

Now, on to the guy and his old version:

Aaand the new version:

Now the problem with this guy was, obviously, that he was built to stand behind the girl, hence he wasn't finished at all! So I kinda had to paint the rest of his body and make the sword longer. I also made some other, smaller changes to him, but it's mainly in the details - except for the mouth. I gave him lips too, and like with the girl, I'm a bit torn about it! What do you guys think?

Here's a mockup of what they could look like when added to our website. I'm not 100% sure of where to put them yet, or what size they should be, but hopefully we'll get that stuff together eventually.. :)

As mentioned yesterday, I'm working on adding more colors and epicness to the menu right now, and today it's time to rework the character box!

The character box is the little box beneath the title box that shows your character name, level, current exp, and how much money you have:

Right now the box is put inside yet another of those brown boxes, and I thought: "WHY"?! There's already so much brown, surely a character box can float on its own!? I also found it a bit unnecessary to show the exp-bar, seeing as it's already visible above the title box. Finally, we received some comments about the gold being a bit hard to see, so with all these things in mind I started working:

This is what the end result looks like, and I definitely like it better:

For characters with longer names, or more gold, the boxes will expand to fit their information:

I have some plans on making some kind of basic decoration(s) going from the title box, behind the character box and down to the info box, tying this part of the menu together a bit more. However, at this point nothing is set in stone - we'll see what I come up with after some sketching!

The next thing I've been wanting to upgrade is the overall look and feel of the in-game menu. Last week I started a bit by upgrading the icons, today I continue by overhauling the Title boxes:

Basically what I'm after is to add more color to the menu, which just feels overwhelmingly brown and boring right now. This is step one. The next step will be upgrading the character box, and then it's on to each of the content pages!

Here's what the character screen looks like right now, though without the new icons:

I think it's definitely a start! What about you? Do you agree, or do you think more brown = better? :)

So to end this week, let's do another portrait :) Here's a friendly winter fae, who is quite pleased that you wish to help his hometown with its issues!

Line Art

Color Blocking

Shading

Highlights & Details

Finished sprite!

The final day of Gotland Game Conference! This day we went down to play some more games - because why not - before heading to have dinner with the other judges and preparing for the Awards ceremony and party (which lasted pretty much all night - thank god we only do these things once a year or so ;)).

Drinking some champagne at the pre-awards VIP mingle.. :o)

There isn't all that much to say about today, other than that I got to talk to so many amazing people! I love attending GGC because you get to meet a lot of people that are much like you - we all love games, developing their different aspects and sharing knowledge and experiences in doing so. After mainly being locked inside our apartment developing day and night, just us three, it's really refreshing to get out and meet some real people in the industry, as well as students about to join us.

Plus, as a gamedev, you can't really play too many games, right? Gotta keep in touch with that side too!

I think that's all for this year's GGC! It's been an honor to be invited for the third year in a row - I'd do it again anytime! :)

BTW, for those that are curious, here's a showreel with all the games participating in this year's GGC:

And here's a list of the winners:

Best First Year Project

Frog Climbers

Best Second Year Project

Clouds Below

Best Graduate Project

Agency

Best Presentation

Tamarrion

The Cha-Ching! Award

Summit Chasers

The Almedalen Library Award

Colors of the Wind

Alumnus of the Year

Rikard Jaksch

The Innovation Award

Workspace Warfare

The Tokyo University of Technology – School of Media Science Dean’s Award

Clouds Below

Students’ Choice Award

PvGvP

The Pwnage Award (Best of Show)

Frog Climbers

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