You’d think after finishing a bunch of sprites for housing, you’re all set, right? Nope! Time for step two in housing: making drop appearances/menu miniatures for everything!

Honestly, if there’s one thing I wish I knew how to streamline better it’s finding the right folder for stuff and saving a ton of items as PNG. Maybe there’s a way I haven’t found yet (I have not exactly done much looking).

Regardless, it takes a tooon of time saving items once you’ve finished making them. Not only do you have to check it for flaws (one of my great skills is accidentally leaving empty pixels in objects, trying to catch that before adding items to the folders now), and actually save it with all that entails, in the case of housing you also need to make menu versions since the big ones are much too large to show properly in the interface!

Above you can see a bunch of examples of miniatures, with the bigger versions below. After making this many, we had a talk about how to display Temple of Seasons stuff (since they will be three versions at once), and I had for some reason assumed that meant I should make three versions of everything. Because that would entail a whole lot of extra coding, we decided to either make one version that were all three at once, or simply stick with one of them and put a special icon next to it showing it gets transformed by the seasons.

After trying out the first idea (see above, upper right), we decided to simply stick with one version, in this case the summer!

And the madness continues! This time a bunch of surfaces and beds~

See that stray pixel between the red tablecloth and the left vines? Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing I’m trying to avoid. And clearly failed to do so before uploading this image! Oh well, at least it won’t be in the game :D

And now…. Time for some Mimic updates!

To make this guy’s eat-attack look a little more interesting we decided to swap out coins of various colors for a different set of items. The mimic will still eat huge coins (which won’t do anything), but the items that cause various effects will be as follow:

Emblem – Causes shockwaves (not pictured yet)
Chili Pepper – Fire
Hourglass – Slows player character(s)
Box of Bombs – The mimic spews out a bunch of bombs!

Since Fred has a very hectic schedule right now with a ton of animations needed for next update, I stepped in to make temporary objects for him to eat (wip above). These will be upgraded and animated by Fred once he has a few spare minutes:

Here’s a GIF showing how the mimic boss has improved since last time. AGAIN all GIFs in this post run slower than in the actual game. I’m looking for a different program to record GIFs in since FRAPS isn’t working anymore and cutting things in GIFcam is a bother. If anyone has any  suggestions they are very welcome! Anyway!! Instead of simply leaving fire on the ground, he now shoots out balls of flame that cause a fire to burn where they land. We also made an effect for the hourglass slow-down, to make it more clear when you get affected by it:

In the third phase, the mimic will grow even bigger and become static. In order to harm the player, he will spew out a ton of random items and enemies.

In this part of the battle we have two options, and we have not quite decided which one to go for yet – either he’ll send the player far back (the room would then be a bit larger vertically) with some kind of pushing attack, then fill up the room with obstacles and enemies the player needs to get past in order to hit the Mimic again. The second option is to have the Mimic invincible, until he gets exhausted (triggered by you clearing enough waves of enemies/items), at which point he’ll reveal his tongue which you can hit do deal damage.

We’ve also discussed a special attack where the Mimic starts sucking all the items he spewed out towards him, causing damage to the player if you get sucked too close (due to spikes or something similar poking out of the chest), but we haven’t finalized that part yet so I cannot say if it will actually appear in the game.

Finally, let’s end this week with a quick look at the skill you’ll unlock in the fourth dungeon~

So this skill has the codename “the ghost skill” because we haven’t come up with anything better yet. What it does is basically it shows you the spirit world, where things look a bit different.

There are a ton of possibilities for this skill, including having enemies that can damage you in the real world by using real weapons, but you cannot hurt them unless you go into the spirit world. There’s also obstacles you can only pass in the spirit world, or hidden treasures only seen while in it.

With this skill you’ll also be able to talk to ghosts, which might help you on your journey or give you quests?! Who knows, this is just a very early prototype after all.

What do you think? Too dark and scary? We’ll do our best to make sure nothing becomes too creepy, just the right amount!