Okay, so it’s finally time to wrap up all this festival business! The patch should be live within the next couple of day (make sure to change your beta to frontline if you’re interested in helping us beta test this – more info on that can be found here), so we’re finally starting to move on doing other stuff. First up though, some last minute additions:

A fourth cutout has been added, so those 4 people parties can each try on a new look!

We’ve also added a photographer who takes a screenshot of everyone behind the cutouts, 5 seconds after you ask her to! Here’s her sprite (made by Fred), and portrait (made by Vilya):

The fishing mini-game has been added, and it’s hosted by none other than Haddock the fish salesman:

The mini-boss encounter has been rebalanced and improved, including the Queen Bee having her own epic summoning animation, for when she summons a couple of bee friends (scared of all the bees you’ll be fighting yet?)…!

And finally, some new facial expressions as well as a brand new portrait has been added:

And with that, the festival is officially wrapped up! *phew*

Now, on to the “moving on” part of this blog, in which Vilya adds another collector portrait to the time travel crowd and has been playing around with adding more greenery and flowers to Mt. Bloom:

….I guess that’s not really that much of having moved on, is it..? Oh well. NEXT WEEK, THOUGH! Next week, we’ll have moved on for sure! No more festival stuff, I, uh, promise! ……Right guys? Right?!

You heard it, there’s one more festival post, but this could be the last one. What remains now is mainly for Teddy to put everything together, so hopefully we’ll have a prototype of the festival up and running sometime next week for our frontline users! :)

So what have we been up to this week? Well, first of all, Vilya finished the treasure cave you saw a preview of last week:

She also made a bunch of new expressions for characters appearing at the festival:

As well as creating a little space for candy, where she’ll sell candies to festival visitors:

She and Teddy also started working on getting the mini-games in place, meaning some simple interfaces:

As you might guess, this particular mini-game involves hitting a button at the right time (when the arrow is near ‘max’), in order to hit the machine as hard as possible!

We also added Oak to the festival, along with some pets to entertain the kids of Evergrind City:

And we’re also working on preparing the city for the festival, meaning once you get back to town after beating the Temple of Seasons, there will be some hints that something is about to happen:

We’re also planning on adding some additional NPCs working on getting this in order, which Fred is currently working on in fact!

Speaking of Fred, he has of course been busy doing flavor animations for festival goers as well! Here’s a few:

See you again next week, with a post that hopefully will have some non-festival stuff! :)

Yes, it’s another week of festival stuff! And most likely there will be at least one more before we’re completely done :)

Vilya has started working on the treasure cave, where the flashback cutscene involving your mother Charlotte and the dragon will take place:

The cave will be filled with gold and treasures of various kinds, and this here is only the WIP of the left part of it – in the end it’ll be twice as big!

We also decided (thanks to Owns suggestion on the forums), to add cutouts to the festival, which you can stand behind:

In the end our idea is that you’ll be able to ask Luke & Marino (whom you’re at the festival with) to stand behind them as well, and we’re currently looking into the possibility of having a cameraman who will create a screenshot for you after you press a button. Not 100% sure if that will work yet though, but we think it’d be pretty fun!

Other than that, a lot of new expressions have been made in order for the characters to express the right feeling(s), both in the flashback cutscene (young dad!) as well as in and around the festival:

More to come next week!

Finally, Fred has started working on another mini-boss battle that will take place near the festival in time, and I’m sure you’ve been missing these guys:

Excited yet? Hang in there for a bit longer, the festival is just around the corner! :3

Hello everyone! Time for another weekly recap! :D This week we’ve mostly focused on the upcoming festival. Teddy has made a prototype for the bee mini-boss, which is coming along nicely (we’re inhouse testing it today, actually)!

The cutscenes that will start the whole thing off have been more or less completed, all we need now is a new background and to implement some minor animations. So that’s what’s Fred been up to – flavor animations for the cutscenes & festival:

Vilya has been making some additional festival decorations: a balloon- and popcorn stand! Here’s a video capture of her work on it:

The balloon stand will be further improved by Fred, who will make a special cluster of balloons surrounding it.

Other than festival stuff, Vilya has also been making more hats (among other things):

And there’s a new portrait of an ancient collector for the next temple, as well:

This week we’ll continue our struggle to get everything ready for the festival & everything that surrounds it. Stay tuned! :D

Another week has ended, in which Teddy finally ha gotten around to work on the infamous cutscene! While there’s still a lot of work to be done, the groundwork has been laid and some interesting reveals will take place…

What in the world could the Bag mean? Hang in there and you’ll find out in time!

Fred has kept working on stuff for the festival, mainly NPC flavor animations and the such to help the festival feel alive and bustling!

Meanwhile, Vilya has been working on a bunch of different things, including giving the Shady Merchant a shop title of his own:

As mentioned before, he will start selling items you’ve previously sold to other NPCs, making it possible to buy back stuff you regret parting with. We thought a fun thing to do would be to increase the amount of items surrounding him as you sell more and more stuff to the other shopkeepers. Right now we’ve made 6 different steps:

There’s also a bunch of new hats (and next week there will be even more!):

Vilya also made a bunch of icons for upcoming achievements, including getting 10 and 20 cards, as well as catching all pets & fishes (though the later two won’t be implemented until the game is done, as we’ll keep adding both pets and fishes until that point):

Aaaaaaand to end this post, there’s two more portraits:

Finally, after such a long wait, the Translation Suite is officially live! This means that it’s now possible to download and use fan translations within the game, as pictured below:

All you need to do to access these is to go into “Options” in the Main Menu, and select “Browse Translations”. If you’re interested in making a translation of your own, there are instructions on how to do that in this post on the forums! :)

This patch also brought an addition to Arcade Mode in the form of the Mold Essence feature:

While the proper art isn’t implemented yet (there will be some color changes and the text will be centered properly), it definitely works and will allow you to spend those hard earned essences on new bragging rights style items!

Meanwhile, Vilya has been preparing facial expressions for the legendary cutscene, a mockup of Evergrind City by night (& festival!):

She’s also been updating the Shop titles, giving them a bit more personality and unique looks:

As for Fred, he’s moved on to creating animations for the festival and it’s mini games! Below is one odd-looking machine that you’ll be able to use once we get this darn cutscene out of the way ;)

Next week, Teddy will be working on the cutscene, Fred will make more animations for the Festival, and Vilya will all sorts of random things! Stay tuned ;3

This week Teddy spent finishing up the translation tool (finally!), which should go live in a few days! He’s now looking into starting up that cutscene business for real, just as Fred has finished his part of that job, giving him a ton of sketched out animations to work with.

Now, instead of cutscene things, Fred is working on a new mini-boss that you’ll have to face soon after the cutscene ends:

Yes, it’s a Queen Bee!! :D Do you feel the horror?!

Vilya, meanwhile, has been all over the place, starting off by creating an interface for Mold Essence in Arcade Mode, which allows you to turn essence into visual upgrades & housing items (among other things):

She then moved back to the time travel area, creating hats, masks, drops and portraits to fill the area with life & loot:

And that’s all for this week! Next up will be prototyping the cutscene, bug fixing the translation tool, and preparing Evergrind City for the next installment of the main story :)

First of all, thank you all for your comments on last week’s blog post, where we asked about how to make it easier to understand the gold points! It seems like you guys are more or less as divided as we are, so we’ll keep thinking about that for a while longer.. :)

Now, on to this week’s post!

Last week we made an interesting decision! Many have asked us for a way to buy back items sold by mistake, and we’ve thought about how and where to add it. We figured, in the end, that we’d turn the shady merchant of Evergrind City into a “buy back” feature, rather than an accessory shop, and let the actual Accessory Shop have its own building, like the rest of the shops! As such, Vilya got to work to create the assets needed.

First up, we needed to decide on the perfect location. And which would be better than the closed off house next to the Blacksmith:

Next up, the building needed a sign, to fit in with the rest of shops! Here’s Vilya’s step-by-step of making it, as well as what it looks like on top of the building:

Now that we have the exterior, we need to create the interior as well, where you’ll actually buy stuff:

Finally, no shop is complete without it’s shopkeeper, right? And here she is:

Now, there are no animations from Fred this week, and that’s because in order to speed things up, he’s making placeholder animations rather than rendering them all to completion one by one. This way, he can make many more sketches & half-finished animations to give to Teddy, who in turn can start working on the cutscene using these placeholders instead of having to wait until every single animation is done! Afterwards, Fred can clean them up and Teddy will just replace the image source!

Pretty nifty, if you ask me. Of course, it also means no animations to show here for a while, as posting half-finished things has had a tendency to confuse people who believe it’s actually the finished thing. Hang in there for now!

Another week has gone past, and while Teddy is still working on the translation tool, he’s been making huge progress! A lot of his time recently has been spent implementing support for languages with different characters, specifically the Asian ones, as the fonts used for those need to be quite a bit bigger than latin alphabet ones.

As a result though, we can now play around with Google translated Japanese in the game:

Most likely everything written there is completely wrong, but hey, we’re no translators!

As we mentioned before, once this tool is done you’ll be able to browse translations through the game client. In order for that to work we need an interface, right? Here’s a mockup Vilya threw together:

Basically, the red squares are placeholders for the icons used by the translation.

The white boxes to the right of the squares are where the translation’s title will be displayed, and the “Subscribed” text will only appear on translations you’ve subscribed to (duh), which means they’ll be added next to your English (Default) selection in the game’s Options.

Beneath the icons are green and red arrows. These indicate how many upvotes vs downvotes each translation has gotten.

The speech bubble-icon will indicate what percentage of the dialogue has been translated, while the cogwheel next to it will tell you the completion percentage of system texts (interface/menu stuff mostly). We figured we’d separate these as many feel that the dialogues are more important than interface stuff, and having a single % would be misleading in cases where 100% of the dialogue has been translated but 0% of the interface, bringing the overall completion unfairly low.

Since we realize these icons may be a bit unclear on their own, we’ll add a description beneath the content box, explaining what the icons mean.

Finally, you’ll be able to use search box to filter the translations based on your language, and it’ll suggest languages based on what you’ve written already!

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Next up, we’re thinking about how to make the use of Gold Skill Points more obvious. A lot of people seem to get a bit confused once they get their first Gold Point, unless they powerleveled a single skill the entire time, leaving them unable to do anything but use the skill point. If you’ve leveled multiple skills though, you’ll end up with a Gold Point you cannot use yet, and there’s no indicator in the menu for what the Gold Points are actually for. So, we’re looking for a way to make that more clear!

Here are some of our options:

Option #1: Keeping it as it is. Yes, this is an option as well. You get a gold point, but there’s no way of telling what it’s for until you’ve leveled a spell enough times to unlock its use – in the meanwhile you just have to keep guessing, or forget about it.

Visually, it’s probably the best looking option.

Option #2: Added silver and gold points to the leveling bar for clarity. This should make it clear that you can use gold points to level skills, but it could still confuse players: they get a gold point, and see that it can be used to level their skills, yet somehow they can’t use it yet?

We worry that with this option, players will believe that they can use silver and gold points to level skills simultaneously, and in the worst case scenario, believe it’s a bug or get frustrated when they can’t use them.

Option #3: Graying out and putting a lock on the gold part of the skill bar. Our hope with this option would be that people will understand that they can use gold points to level skills, but that they’re locked for now. Once you’ve put your 5 silver points in a skill, an animation + sound effect will play which unlocks the next 5 points (making the skill bar look like the one in Option #2, as illustrated under the second skill above).

Probably the most informative option – if people understand the visual cues – but also possibly the least visually pleasing.

Option #4: Basically a slightly less cluttered version of Option #3, where the grayed out portion of the bar will disappear, and the blue crystal will turn yellow once you start using gold points (as illustrated under the second skill above).

Which one do you prefer? Let us know in the comments!

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To end this post, we have some regular art stuff as well. Vilya has continued working on both backgrounds and characters:

And Fred continues to create dragon animations:

See you next week! :D

We’re still a long way to go before everything is ready for this epic cutscene, but Fred is working as fast as he can! Here’s another animation, featuring the dragon as it wakes up (gasp!):

While Fred is busy animating stuff for the flashback cutscene with Charlotte and the dragon, Teddy has jumped into creating a new and improved version of the translation tool, that will work with Steam workshop! This means you awesome translators out there no longer have to go through the hassle of zipping and uploading stuff to the forums every time there’s a tiny update.

Also, once the tool is finished, we’ll implement a way to browse translations directly through the game, so this should make things a lot easier for those wanting to use the translations as well.

As for Vilya, she actually went away on a riding camp last week, but she was kind enough to prepare a bunch of portraits for this post, which were also posted on her blog while she was gone:

The first are variations of the Evergrind Arena receptionist, which will appear in other areas where it makes sense to have a front desk manager (though they will probably be regular NPCs and not host a set of challenges like the original receptionist)!

Second row is a bunch of people from the time travel area, and the last one (with text box added for effect) is the portrait of a mini-boss that will appear later on!