Last week we uploaded the main quest of Mount Bloom to the Frontline beta, but as you know, we still have a way to go before the mountain is complete! So, this week we’ve mainly been focusing on the side quests and secrets that will appear in the caves.

We’re planning on adding four side quests/secrets to the mountain. Two of those will be regular quests, and two of them will be challenges or puzzles you’ll have to find on your own, so to speak. Once the rest of the game is complete, we’ll probably return to Mount Bloom (as well as all the other areas) and add more side stuff, but for now I think we all want to move along as quickly as possible and get more main story completed, right? Therefore, we’ll settle for four things for now, which should be enough to make the mountain feel alive for people running through the stable beta.

So, Teddy has been on prototyping duty. Spoiler spoiler, but there will be more Phase Shift puzzles as part of one of the secrets – and they’re gonna be a lot harder than the main story ones! These puzzles need to be thought out, prototyped using the game engine and then tried by us and our closest friends before we decide which ones we actually want to use – and which ones need to be edited, scrapped or made harder…

Vilya, meanwhile, has been working on some additional backgrounds which will lead you to the hidden puzzle(s):

We also figured that the Power Flower boss needed a boss portrait – it just seemed a little bit lame the way it appeared without any sort of introduction. So we went ahead and added one of those too:

Fred has also been working on some NPC animations for the side quests, but because they would more or less spoil the outcome of our quests, we decided against showing them. Instead, here’s a few more boss animations he’s been doing as well:

As you may or may not see, these animations aren’t done yet: when we make enemy sprites we always make “sketch”-animations for them to begin with, where some pixels may be missing or certain lines aren’t properly cleaned up. This way, if we end up scrapping an attack or want to change the way it looks when we prototype the actual fight, we won’t have wasted as much time. Only after it’s possible to play the entire boss with all animation sketches added and everything feels good, we let Fred continue on to polish & clean up the sketches.

Speaking of sketches, Fred also started working on one of the enemies you’ll meet in the time travel temple…. A monkey! Here’s a bunch of sketches he made while trying to come up with what the monkey should look like, as well as the final versions we decided upon:

The colors may yet change once they’re added to the game and we see what they look like against the background. But, that’s for another post! For now, it’s time for us to head back to side quest making.

See you soon!