Time to make some more portraits for the flashback orbs you’ll be able to find throughout the world in that upcoming stable patch (and the frontline patch that naturally will precede it). Perhaps you’ll be able to recognize this silly young girl, and imagine what awesome trio will be featured in the next orb we’re making:

Any guesses? ;)

Next up, unsurprisingly… Two young gangsters in the making, and now I think you most certainly can start to guess who will be the subject of this flashback orb:

However, there’s one more character involved in the events that will be portrayed…

Hold your horses. Mandrake. Out of all characters, why Mandrake? What did he do in his young days to warrant a portrayal in a flashback orb? What’s his connection to the Black Ferrets? Has he really always looked this ridiculous?!

I guess y’all better find this memory orb and find out (once it’s been implemented) :D

Alright, so previously I’ve mentioned three flashback orbs that will be available, dealing with Zhamla finding his first card, Young Dad meeting equally young Ivy and Charlotte, and Charlotte speaking to the winter elder after saving Santa Fae from the legendary Goblin King.

Since then we’ve decided to add two more such orbs, one that details how the Black Ferrets gang came to be (which yes, weirdly enough involves professor Mandrake!), and one that features Professor Pine and Tannie working on the weapons they used when trying to defeat Zhamla.

The portraits for the mentioned events have been made, but now they all need expressions to fit what’s going on:

Meanwhile, a different piece remaining before the desert is fully ready for the stable patch is a set of treasure maps. These will be given to you by the archaeologist Finder, who is busy doing other things and cannot dig at so many places at the same time. So it’s up to you to find and bring back these ancient treasures to the archaeologist’s collection:

Perhaps by doing so, you might even get some sort of reward?!

As for the maps themselves, they too need to be made. And since you’re here and have read this far, you can have a look at them before anyone else:

Can you figure out where to look for the treasure? :)

And now an update from the programming and animation department! Teddy and Fred have been working hard on adding the remaining Flashback Orbs, which which means there’s a ton of new sprites and animations needed. First one of young Zhamla casting a spell:

Vilya beating someone up:

Young mandrake’s design and animations of him walking threateningly and running away from something scary (wonder what that could be):

And a bunch of designs for an ancient piece of weaponry, once meant for Phaseman. Unfortunately (?) for the player, the piece ended up sold and shipped off on a certain ship instead. The first time we’ll see this ancient relic is in the flashback orb with Tannie and Professor Pine, but I have a feeling you’ll see it again, somewhere…

Since we’re adding a bunch of quests, drops and a few craftables, there’a also a bunch of items to be made. Here we have the given #1 favorite weapon for all classes, a book:

And the #1 favorite housing item for every player in the world, the cat food bowl in action:

Who can’t wait to fill their house with cats?!

Continuing with the memory orb stuff, it’s time for me to make a bunch of edits to the backgrounds! Since the world the memory orbs show are several (sometimes hundreds of) years in the past, it’s only natural some things have changed.

For one, since we’ve seen the Rabby statues be made around the time of your completion of the Collector’s trial, it needs a background version where they don’t exist yet:

And in Santa Fae / Seasonne, the NPCs comment on how it’s not supposed to be winter in the area yet. So what better way of showing the memory shown in the memory orb is nowhere near recent, but the make the world it shows in a different season altogether?

Finally, in Startington, we go so far back in time there’s not yet anyone living on the mountain. Instead it’s infested by slimes and trees!

Of course, in the above version, we used the old version of the trees, which has since been replaced by the correct ones (and slightly edited since Teddy changed the number of slimes between me making the background above and the finished thing):

As we’ve also decided to add the season orbs needed to reach certain parts you haven’t been able to reach yet, I’ve been making some snowy paths around Grindea to get you across where you need to go:

We’ve also decided to add a housing item in the form of a bowl of cat food! This will be awarded in a quest, and if you place the item in your house you’ll soon find you have a guest… :)

As such, Fred has been making some additional cat animations, to make sure your cat can move around the house:

Teddy, meanwhile, has been implementing said quest and will soon begin working on the next things, among which are those memory orbs!

We’ve also received the sound effects we need, and although there might be a few more needed for these side quests and memory orbs we’re currently working on, most of them have been chosen and ready to be implemented. I think it’s gonna be a quite different experience to play through the areas with all these glorious sound effects, so stay tuned for that :)

P.S. Remember how I mentioned the Ghost Ship “cleaning room” was the first room of the second floor, but it mysteriously didn’t have any stairs leading below deck? I’ve fixed it! And also added a missing door to the right, leading to the bunk room:

Though now I wonder if I should remove the windows haha! Having them there would probably only work if you imagine they’re *really* thick… Oh well!

And now…

https://youtu.be/souq841cuXM

What’s this?! A new kind of room, not exactly fitting into any of the sceneries we’ve been working on lately? Where could this be?!

Alright, so this is a “hidden” (not exactly) room that will be added to the church of Port Monnaie, where you’ll be able to read some interesting (?) documents on the history of the faith and Grindea herself.

…Because that’s clearly the kind of things one would keep in a damp cellar such as this…

Not sure whether this will be added to the upcoming stable patch or if it’ll be a later addition yet, but now it’s been made, anyway!

We’re not only making progress with the stable patch, there’s been a ton of progress in the enemy department as well! Let’s take a first look at our set of enemies, starting with the sword-wielding sailor:

As you can see, his sword is part of the physical world and can harm you even outside of the ghost world. Unfortunately, you can’t damage the sword, so you’ll have to toggle into the spirit world, where his ghastly form is visible, to do damage to him!

On this ship we also have a new and improved version of the Ghosty, which leaves a trail of some kind of ectoplasm on the ground. The ectoplasm doesn’t do anything in the ‘regular’ world, but once you enter the ghost world it will slow you down a lot! Both the Ghosty and the ectoplasm will probably be recolored, the ghost so it’ll look more unique compared to the Pumpkin Woods version, and the ectoplasm because.. red ectoplasm seems weird!

In the gif above you can also see something we’ve been playing around with: a line of skulls that do damage in the ghost world which you can only avoid by toggling back to your own dimension.

And this leads us to the third enemy so far, the sailor mage! These fellows have two main abilities – they can damage you, and they can turn another enemy into an elite. Below you can see our first iteration, where the mage channels a spell at you, which is basically a lightning blast that will hit you for sure unless you return to the regular world, as well as it channeling the make-elite spell at the sailor swordsman:

Since we felt this could be improved on quite a bit, we made a bunch of changes, merging the mage with the skull-line ability: meaning we removed the channeling lightning blast and instead having the mage cast the skull line we played around with in the Ghosty gif.

We also changed the spell type of the make-elite spell from something that channels on top of the enemy to an orb that is released from the mage and flows into the enemy it’s buffing, in this way making the battlefield much less cluttered while the mage channels his spells:

We’re also working on a third type of attack for the mage, where he’ll be able to pick up items in the regular world and hurl them at you from a distance – like some kind of poltergeist! Needless to say, working on these enemies around the the time of Halloween has been great.. :)

…so here we have the first iteration of the poltergeist attack! First as a WIP in Evergrind City:

… and then as a more finalized version inside the ghost ship, looking more like it should in the end:

This attack definitely make things more interesting! With this set of enemies, things are already pretty hectic and fun, but in the end we’ll likely make one more; a crab of some kind that is a ‘regular’, that is, living enemy that works the same both in the normal world and the ghost world.

I personally feel the battles on this ship are among the most fun we’ve made in the game so far, so I hope you guys will enjoy it too!

Lastly, Fred’s making a bunch of progress for the memory orbs as well! Gotta have young version sprites of Dad, Ivy and Charlotte after all! Here we have a bunch of them in action:

Time to start making items that will be sold in the market area of Port Monnaie, and we begin with the jar salesman! Early on we thought he’d sell regular jars from each area, but then we changed our mind into giving him special drops and having the regular jars being crafted from shards instead – you gotta do something with all the jar shards, right?

So, in this video I’ll be making a set of jars he’ll sell. They will be available as housing items after your purchase, so make sure to upgrade your house with these new decorations once they’ve been implemented!

 

At the end of the video and below, the upper row features the items as they will look in your house, while the lower ones are smaller version sprites used in the interface:

More housing items incoming! Today I’ve been making the basic furniture that will unlock for purchase as you reach the desert areas, as well as a bunch that will be available for sale in the market area of Port Monnaie.

First up, the basic items, the usual set of tables, chairs, the bed, a window and some other random things:

These carpets will be for sale in the market:

And here we have some things available from the souvenir salesman, a desert poster, a card container with a fake card, and an essence replica:

Of course, all of these things need inventory sprites as well (which need to be a lot smaller, so I made a bunch of them and recorded the process):

 

And here we have the final set:

And here we have the last desert card, featuring the veggies! Here they’re forming a rather nutritious salad, though who would have the heart to eat these cuties?

 

And now, some random additions, starting with the many variations of Charlotte’s hair- and skin colors! Since she changes appearance based on what the player character looks like, I made a bunch of variations. The hair is a separate sprite put on top of her existing sprite in one of the three skin color variations:

We haven’t forgotten fishing, of course! Brand new fishes will be available in the desert once it’s ready for stable, and here’s two of the new additions:

A sand shark and a Cactish (or some such)! We’ve also made a tiny model ship that will be available as a housing item, however this is a reward from a chest (or quest) rather than being fished up:

I might have spoiled this a bit in our Discord server, but there will indeed be more math puzzles! These ones are optional though, so you can relax – unless you’re out to 100% the game this isn’t something you’ll have to worry about!

These puzzles are a bit different compared to the ones already in the game, as these will involve more actual math (including addition, subtraction and multiplication (OH GOD WHY)). Suffice to say testing these prototypes as someone who is a total disaster at math was… interesting.

In any case, you don’t only need math skills to get through this, you also need some smarts, cause in order to actually reach the math puzzles, you need to solve a different kind of puzzle, involving numbers in a completely different way, and for this a set of statues with the numbers 1-6 had to be made:

Where will this all end?! I’m almost scared to think of it…! In the second cave system, this special entrance is where you need to solve a sequence of six numbers in order to proceed to the actual math puzzles. Here’s the prototype used by Teddy at the moment:

And now it’s my turn to transform this into something that looks more finished. This time around I made a video featuring how I made this entrance, as well as the reward cave that is unlocked after you’ve finished the math puzzles within:

Here’s the finished backgrounds:

…why the reward room has another stairway leading below ground? Oh, that’s so you can access another cave system which has a (literally) never ending supply of math puzzles!

…

…no, I’m not joking.

Once again, thanks for all the feedback surrounding the desert patch! Now it’s a new week with new adventures, and for now we’ll focus more on upcoming stuff!

So while the actual room-by-room design of the upper floors of the ghost ship haven’t been decided, we know what types of rooms we want, and one such room is the cabin. Or cabins, really. We’d like the player to battle their way through a set of cabins on the second or third floor, so naturally we need to make a bunch of items that can be seen in these cabins. As such, I made a random design of what one such room could look like, and made a bunch of random props to put in it.

I know I mentioned we’d continue on adding things for the desert’s stable release, but I’ll have plenty of time to do that while throwing in a ghost ship background or two… :)

Let’s take a look:

 

 

Next, another portrait from past times: this time featuring young dad!!

At this time in his life, he recently got accepted as a Collector after passing the trials, along with Charlotte (your mom) and Ivy, who went on to become the grandmaster of the Collectors.

And now, what I believe to be the last in a series of the younger version portraits: Ivy, from a time before she became the leader for the Collectors!

Who is this mysterious person, and what was her relationship with Dad and Charlotte like in the past? All questions that may soon be answered through those memory orbs…

Next up, another card… There are still a few left, after all! This is the Orange Slime card, featuring an orange slime used as a saw by the desert’s own carpenter, Mallet:

 

 

Meanwhile, after having made a ton of NPCs for the desert, it’s finally time for Fred to start working on the Ghost Ship enemies!!

The first enemy he’s making is a skeleton ghost, which will come in two versions: one that wields a sword, and one that uses magic to buff and debuff the surrounding players and enemies! As usual, he’s made a lot of sketches featuring different versions of the enemy below (starting with the sword-wielding one), with the one in the green circle representing the one he’s decided to work with for the first couple of animations.

The magic user version will likely have a different color scarf and a slightly changed hat:

Exciting times! Can’t wait to start prototyping and testing these guys out, it’s gonna be so nice to move on to a different area after so many months working on the desert! As always, it’s great to be an indie dev cause as soon as you get tired of one thing, everything changes and you need to start working on something else!

Next up, we have another boss portrait! This one of course featuring the Solem boss you’ll face off against inside the ruins:

Since he has a gem for a face, we thought what better name for this swell guy, than Sol-Gem? Said and done:

As always, there’s a ton of minor things to add and adjust right before an update, so here’s a very mixed set of things, starting with two new expressions for one of the characters in town:

A slight edit of the first desert ruin room, where we’ve removed one of the scriptures for a small note on the wall, carved by some ancient apprentice:

In the second room of the ruins, we’ve moved down the altar for the gem so there’s enough room for the giant rock to appear behind it, as well as a more broken version of the arc that will replace the previous one once the rock has rolled into it:

The scriptures around the desert have gotten some upgrades too (or should I say downgrades), since we didn’t want the text to be readable we’ve decided to make them look torn and broken enough to justify the text not being legible:

In the math puzzle cave, I also went ahead and added those number wizard statues I mentioned before, and have since decided to upgrade the look and feel of the first cave slightly as well (more on that later):

Now we have this week’s portrait, which features a giant of a man who works in the desert mine. His name is Big Brutus, and I have a feeling he’s not someone you want to mess around with:

Now, for those math puzzles… First up, I’ve made the other two caves in this system, which was pretty straight forward after everything was completed in the first cave:

But then I thought the first one looks just too simple, especially when there’s so much sand in it, so I decided to mix things up and make a slightly more interesting background for this one. So here we have the process:

And the final version of the first room, yay:

Alright, so there was one thing remaining to do in the desert ruins, and as most of the things have been implemented by now, it’s time to get going with these puzzle blocks!

These blocks are special in the sense that you need to place them correctly according to a creation myth found within the temple, so instead of just regular blocks, they have a slightly more interesting look:

 

 

And here’s the final blocks by the end of the video:

Progress on the desert continues! We’ve now started implementing things in those desert ruins, where you’ll face another boss battle. When I mentioned there was gonna be an Indiana Jones-y scene in here, some of you wondered of what kind… I think this GIF should answer that question for you:

WIP of course, this is but the first step of the iteration!

Speaking of iterations, we’re also working on the boss! This Solem is a very dangerous guy who likes to use his laser in creative ways. Good thing he also slams his fists in the ground, causing giant rocks to fall from the ceiling that can block such beams for you:

(One everything is implemented, the rock will look to be part of the ruin, rather than a random Mt:Bloom-esque boulder!)

He has another fierce laser attack as well, featuring multiple beams that follow you for a little while:

Aside from these, he’ll act like a regular, but amped-up Solem, chasing you around trying to hit you. He’ll also have one attack where he slams his fists in the ground causing shockwaves to appear all around him, which you’ll have to dodge.

Fred’s continuing to work on his animations, too, of course so here’s a more finalized version of what he’ll look like as he blasts those laser beams at you:

There are more caves in the making, as well! Those math puzzle caves had to be designed, and to mix things up I decided to go for a slightly different color scheme compared to the rest of the caves in the desert:

It looks a little bare right now, so we’ll probably add some more details, maybe in the form of statues of numbers, or perhaps even of the number wizard who made these challenges in the first time! For now though, here’s the first iteration of the first math puzzle cave:

Can’t have new bosses without new boss portraits, so here’s an upgraded version of Marino’s boss portrait, featuring his lovely shadow clones!

As you might remember, his last subtitle was The Ultimate Rival, however, as the story progresses some things change… Why an “ultimate friend” would fight you? I guess you’ll just have to play through the story and see!

I’ve mentioned this before, but the relationships between the characters haven’t been super fleshed out, a fact we are well aware of and will likely remedy slightly by adding more scenes to the story (once the rest of the game is done). This way we also hope to give an incentive to those of you who have played along chapter-by-chapter with every new update to play through the whole thing once more time, the way it’s supposed to be experienced in the end. In the end, we plan for the finished product to feature slightly more story as well as new side quests for most (if not all) parts of the game.

As for this week’s portrait, it features a pirate hanging out in the saloon! In fact, he’ll be one of the card players (whom I actually made a portrait of before – but his sprite got changed afterwards, so that old portrait will probably become a different NPC at some point instead):

Finally, Marino’s second boss battle has been finished and fully implemented, so now it’s time to spice up the little are where you face him! Previously, we’d left it pretty open, as we weren’t sure exactly how big his battle arena would be (we like to prototype the fight first and base the area on how much space we feel is needed).

Below you can see the old area, with the battle taking place inside the darkened frame:

In order to spice this up, I made a quick sketch of what it could look like instead, adding a level difference to act as the limitation downwards. Adding this, we had to increase the size of the map slightly downward as well, to make room for everything:

And then, it’s time to make the actual graphic adjustments for these changes:

And here’s the final version, featuring a much smaller battle area, and a slightly more interesting looking map overall:

Okay! Who’s ready for more desert fixes?! Seeing as we’ve named the desert Dragonbone Dunes, we wanted to add more dragon stuff to the area. First step is to make some dragon head statue pillars:

We also wanted to decorate those walls with some dragon wing plates:

But not all fixes on this map are of the dragon-decorative kind! There’s also a puzzle, which, as it’s now been properly designed, needs a more permanent background:

As part of the puzzle, we decided to add a bonus chest as well, so made a slight extension of one of the rocks to make room for that:

Behold the progress so far, almost done:

…actually, scratch that! Since the cave in the middle is a mushroom cacti cave, I thought it’d be fitting to put a bunch of them outside as well:

In the animation department, Fred has been hard at work with some cool environmental things that will appear in the desert! First up, we have the frozen cacti that will unlock a shortcut further into the desert, once you reach a certain season orb:

Second, a rope ladder! Since there’s a place where we really want the player to be able to move up and down quickly (though only after getting there the first time), we decided to introduce a rope ladder that you’ll be able to ‘activate’ after making your way to it.

No desert is complete without tumbleweed, so Fred has been experimenting with getting those up and running as well! Here’s a bunch of his WIP ideas:

He’s also making more NPCs, and here we have the progress sheet of the old scientist looking for ghosts! We’ve decided to name her Dr. Spengler as tribute to a special character in this sort of field. Who do you think that is?

As for something completely different: as I believe we have mentioned, once you complete Tai Ming, flashback orbs will activate throughout all of Grindea. While we haven’t added any just yet, these flashback orbs are set to give you insights into events that happened before you were around; stories of your parents, Zhamla, and other important events that have occurred throughout the world.

As part of the desert update, at least before it gets released on stable, we’ll include a set of these with more to be added in later updates.

The ones we’ll include in this update features memories that give some insight into your mother’s friendship with the fae, how your parents met, and how Zhamla found his first card! While they might not be vital to the story as a whole, we feel that each of these orbs will give some depth to the world and the people within it.

The dialogue for these have already been written, but we’ll return to actually implement them once the rest of the desert is done; likely while you guys are all busy beta testing those new enemies and boss fights!

In the end, once the game is done, we want to add plenty of these orbs, to give you a glimpse of many different things of the past. Are there any events or characters in particular you’d like to see? Let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

As or the portraits this week, the first one features the hat salesman of Port Monnaie, which we actually have decided to give quite a story. Because Helmut is a real life name that’s simply too good to pass up on, we decided to name this guy just that. However, seeing as we have a helmet called Helmit, we didn’t want to confuse people too much by having two characters with very similar names…. So we decided that Helmut and Helmit will be friends!

As such, you old acquaintance from Tai Ming will make a comeback in the desert town, where he’ll be hanging out with this swell fellow:

Finished sprite:

And you can’t have a beach town without tourists, so the second portrait this week will feature a guy shopping for souvenirs at the market place in Port Monnaie: currently, he’s very interested in a t-shirt!

Alright, so as you might know, one of the boss battles you’ll be dealing with in the desert is the return of Marino, who wants a second shot at beating you up! This time around, he’s leveled up and uses some crazy clone action to make this battle even harder.

As part of the prototyping process we’ve played around with a number of different patterns and types of attack. Here’s an early version of one such attack:

We want to play around with Marino and his clones moving across the playfield quickly, meaning you have to mind where you stand, or even move around in order to avoid damage:

We have multiple patterns like this, which will become more and more difficult as the fight progresses. Of course, there’s a lot of placeholder graphics here, but the overall idea is the same: there will be some sort of visual indicator for where Marino and his clones will move next, which fades away once they make that move.

Marino being Marino, he’s also learned the noble art of taunting his opponent, but be careful to attack him blindly, or you might come to regret it:

Now, time to continue working on the second room in those desert ruins! As mentioned before, it’s time to start working on the top part of this map, where some forgotten, ancient treasures will be….

 

In this final part we add more detail, but also that fancy mirror and the pedestal holding a very special crystal which might be directly linked to the boss battle in this ruin:

 

Our first portrait this week is a miner working in the desert! Like the other miners in our game, she wears the typical mining uniform, including the miner hat. The miner hat I use has already been made previously, so I only added it after the rest of the portrait was done:

The second portrait features one of the characters I forgot making a portrait for, which in this case is rather silly seeing as I made his shop stand and everything! This is the jewelry (accessory) salesman, selling items in the desert town’s market area:

This week we’ve finally started planning the next dungeon in more detail! As mentioned previously, the final dungeon will be a ghost ship, with a skill that allows you to enter the spirit world, where you can see (and interact with) things you don’t normally see…

As most of you are probably aware by now, this blog is full of spoilers, but I thought I’d make another spoiler warning for the remainder of this post, as I’ll be going into more detail than usual.

So, what we’ve talked about recently is the main design on the dungeon, how things will start out once you enter the ship, and some of the mechanics we’re looking into using here.

To begin with, we’ll be adding another character that will make its first appearance earlier in the story than we are currently. While we’re not super excited to go back in time and add characters, hints and other things in areas most of you have likely played through already, I’m afraid it’s unavoidable when working on a game like this, chapter by chapter. We’d have to be geniuses or have thought out the game in much more specific detail before beginning any area to avoid this completely – and often you don’t realize what’s missing until you’ve had enough feedback from beta testers (or when it comes to story elements I guess you guys are more like beta readers). We already know we’ll add a bunch of extra scenes in the beginning to flesh out the story and relationships slightly, before the game is done. This will just be one more thing like that. Hopefully, this will give you all an incentive to play through the game once more at release, when all these additions and small changes are in place, to experience the story as we intend it to be experienced – in one go with all the proper story elements there from the beginning!

Anyway!! The character we’ll be adding is another scientist hanging out with Dad and the other scientists in the HQ lab. This character, however, will be focused on researching the spirit world, whether it truly exists, and how one would interact with it. Sometime into the story, he will have heard rumors of a ghost ship and will take off to investigate…

So, as you enter said ghost ship, you’ll meet with a flying weapon and someone hurling curses at you that you can’t see. Well, that’s a bit of a problem! Ignoring this threat, you continue onwards, battle some of our new enemies (more on those later), see a locked door, and eventually run into the scientist who will give you his spirit world machine that allows you to enter and interact with the spirits haunting the ship.

The gimmick of the ship will be to enter and exit the spirit world in order to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. Some enemies you’ll only be able to damage in the spirit world, but entering the spirit world will allow them to attack you with more attacks and deal more damage, as well. There will be enemies harassing you in the regular world, too, of course – so nowhere’s truly safe, but each world will have their own challenges. We’ll have our work cut out for us in making sure there is balance between the two and none you just stick to the entire dungeon. One of our ideas for this is having a meter limiting how long you can spend in the spirit world, since that’s the place you’ll be able to get rid of most of the enemies – and it’s a mechanic that helps increase the stakes in certain puzzles, when you can’t spend unlimited time solving them.

There’s a lot more discussion to be had, but for now I feel we have a good grasp on the early stages of the dungeon! For now, onwards with the desert and that final part of the desert ruins! This time we get into the details, adding those small things that tie everything together:

As you might have guessed, there will be a puzzle of some sort in the middle. While we know approximately what this will look like, we haven’t ironed out the specifics yet so for now it will remain empty.

Aside from that, here’s what it looks like in its completed state:

Since I’m finally running low on portraits to make, this week there will be just one! This guy is another oldtimer, made by Fred quite a while ago. He’s a gangster – or at least a gangster looking kind of guy (actually, you know, maybe he just likes to wear a suit.. who am I to judge?) – who hangs out in the saloon, playing cards:

Finished portrait:

You’d think we’d be finished with the desert graphics soon, but oh no, now that things are finally started to get implemented, there are a ton of edits that needs to be made – some things you just don’t realize need fixing before they have been properly added to the engine…

First up, we have the exterior of the desert ruin. Now that the ruins will be slightly bigger than we first though, we felt it needed to look just a little bigger on the outside too:

Then we have this area, which never got finished in the first place:

Earlier we actually thought we’d have some sort of desert storm challenge there, where you’d have to navigate your way through a desert storm, barely able to see anything. Since we didn’t have the details or layout for that ironed out yet, I just left that part of the desert empty. Since then, we changed things around and put the map with the saloon to the left instead, so now it was simply time to complete the map.

We’ve also decided to add a cave right before the season orb below, to give you a bit more of a challenge other than simply walking around to hit it (it will come as no surprise that you need to hit it to get across to the other side):

In this cave we’ll have a new type of puzzle, one we’re actually quite excited about! This one will be all about math, having you step on plates to make up a number shown inside the cave. Basic sketch below:

We plan on having three puzzles like this inside the cave, of varying difficulty (one will likely have 9 plates, another 20). One will also feature plates with enemies on them, which means you’ll essentially build your own encounter once you step out of the plates. Fun times!

Meanwhile, Fred has been working on the desert enemies. Here’s a zoomed in version of those birds that will attack you after hatching out of eggs, cause it’s simply too cute to pass up on showing:

We’ve also been working on the Solem laser! It’s now a lot brighter and more intense, clearly showing the difference between simply aiming and actually attacking you:

Fred has also been working on the puzzle plates we’ll use in those math puzzles mentioned. Here you can see the enemy plates as well, so cute:

In the end, it’s likely we’ll adjust the colors of this – but for now this is the basic idea of what they’ll look like!

The enemy prototyping continues! This week a lot has happened. First, we change our mind about the bird mechanic I mentioned previously, with different eggs causing different mishaps if you let them hatch. We agreed it got a little bit too crazy and reminded everyone a bit too much of the Mimic battle you just completed, so instead we’ve been playing around with each egg hatching a swarm of smaller birds to harass the player!

In this first version (above) we used the bat swarm as placeholder graphics for the swarm to test it out. At this point it was also possible to end a swarm by hitting it, however, since you can’t remove bat swarms by hitting them, and this mechanic will work and look in a similar way, we decided that you won’t be able to in the final version.

Below you can see the version with the proper bird graphics, made by Fred:

As you can see in the image above, we’ve also started working on the final enemy in the lineup – the Solem! He can now dash towards you, slam his fists into the ground, and he also has a laser that will start firing at you after aiming for a short while:

In the above GIF there isn’t much difference between the aim and the actual laser – the graphics are the same, only when he shoots the laser there’s an effect on the ground as well. This was the first thing we wanted to improve, as can be seen below:

Now the laser is slightly bigger, but before we’re fully satisfied we’ll probably work on that a bit more – as well as adding a proper charge animation for the Solem (which currently is static, as you can see). Other than that we’re actually starting to feel pretty good about this lineup! Just a few more tweaks and we’ll be happy I think :)

Next up, there are more portraits (but we’re slowly reaching the end!! Just a few more)… This one’s the Lady Mayor, either the actual Mayor or the wife of the Mayor (not decided yet) of the Desert Town.

In the game, you’ll find her on the top floor of the Mayor’s house, where she’s quite fed up with her husband’s ways (I think)! At least, that’s how I imagine it for now, we’ll see what happens once it’s time to write the dialogue and start working out those quests in detail :D

The second portrait this week belongs to one of the older NPCs of this area – in terms of when Fred made the sprite, anyway! I wanted to make this portrait a while ago, but there was a lot of other characters made that somehow leap ahead in the to-do list. Now, however, it’s finally time for mr sunscreen (he applies sunscreen in his animation) to get his portrait!

Alright, now it’s time to start working on another interior!! This here is the “legendary” desert ruin, where you’ll face a new boss/mini-boss kind of deal and continue the main story!

In this first part I’m focusing on getting the basics done – this involves some color tweaking of the graphics I made before, plus some new stuff. The video got quite long so I’ve decided to split this in several parts – I think there will be three in total!

…and here we have the second part of those desert ruins! This time we focus on adding wall decorations mainly – there’s a bunch of them needed, from the door, to the script tablets where you can read some juicy(?) backstory, to the decorative cacti!

What remains to be done now is all the detail work, adding those small things that tie a map together and give it some personality. We’ll save that for next week, though! Stay tuned :)