Hello Collectors!

This week, Teddy has been focusing on the multiplayer aspect of the Temple of Seasons! We’ll patch the Frontline beta to include this in the next few days.

Bug hunters can rejoice in that multiplayer is, as always, the most error prone part, although from basic testing it seems stable. Which means in reality, when you guys get your hands on it, it probably won’t be stable at all! :D

It all works if you stand perfectly still!

Meanwhile, Fred has been whipping together the final animations required for the cutscenes at the end of the temple, and Vilya is making the desert area interesting with tons of props and details!

As you can see, we’re going for a rocky type of desert, with lots of ridges and set pieces! Apparently, people absolutely love deserts as it is, so hopefully ours won’t be an exception.

…but wait, what is this? Looks like Evergrind City but something’s different…

We kicked off last week by doing a sneaky little update of the Frontline beta, containing the final boss fight of the Temple of Seasons. While it isn’t 100% ready in terms of graphics and cut scenes, we really wanted some insight in how people felt the fight played. We are reaching a point in the game where the difficulty is starting to really kick off, which makes the beta testers more important than ever. Making a boss or area hard is easy — making it fair and fun is the tricky part!

Anyway! With some much appreciated help from our loyal beta testers, old and new alike, we got a good dose of feedback and critique. The general vibe was positive, so with some more tinkering we’re hoping we’ll end up with a boss you’ll enjoy getting your asses kicked by!

Vilya took the time to clean up the room of the boss battle, pulling her (presumably) last straw to the second dungeon-stack!

While not there just yet, Fred is nearing the finish line on his end as well. With all of the actual battle stuff for the boss out of the way, the cut scene animations took center stage!

So while Fred and Teddy have been working on the final touches of the temple, Vilya have kept speeding ahead and started working on the next big area of the game. Still nameless, we’ve settle upon a Desert (with some twists!) that will be the connecting area to the fourth dungeon. Below are some prop and color testing:

Now we know, desert areas in RPG don’t generally tend to be anyone’s favorite. Heck, even 2/3 of Pixel Ferrets hate deserts in RPGs with a deep and devoted passion. Therefore, we’re more determined then ever to infuse it with as much care and love as humanly possible to make it stand out! With some added Pixel Ferrets magic, we might end up with the first ever enjoyable RPG desert. Fingers crossed!

Last week, Teddy and Fred spent most of their time working on the Temple of Seasons boss. Vilya, in the meanwhile, jumped over to the next area – Mount Bloom – and started decorating a couple of the caves you’ll be exploring!

This is what the caves looked like before she started (as always, click any of these pictures to view a larger version):

And here’s a bunch of WIPs of the various decorations:

The result? Here they are, the caves with all the decorations:

She also had enough time to finish two cards, dropped by enemies in this area:

We’re drawing closer to the second patch of the Temple of Seasons testing. So close, in fact, we’re going to unleash it tomorrow, together with some fixes for bugs you guys hunted down in the past couple of weeks!

The patch will feature more progression (everything except the boss), drops for all the enemies, ability to get the actual cards, and also the proper music for the temple. Below are some of the drops you’ll going to find (the hats not included):

After this patch has been uploaded, we’ll turn all our attention towards finishing up the boss of the temple! Fred has already done a good chunk of animation work on him, and we think he’ll turn out great, but we’ll keep him out of this blog so that not everything is revealed!

Vilya, being done for now with everything she can do on the temple, has worked on things both from before and after Seasonne and the Temple of Seasons! For example, she made this Crystal Bug card (an enemy from Mt. Bloom), and also some slight style changes on a few characters in the very beginning of the game:

So for anyone that missed it, we kept our promise from two weeks ago and updated the Frontline version of the beta! This updates includes the first part of the Temple of Seasons, including two of the three planned bosses. If you have no idea of who or what the Frontline beta is, head over here for more information.

We are really interested to hear what you guys think about the dungeon so far, in terms of difficulty and just pure entertainment value. It’s easy for us to stare ourselves blind while working on the game each and everyday so your thoughts are highly valued!

So with the first part of the dungeon out of the picture for now, we’ve naturally focused last weeks attention on the second part.
We’ve added graphics and animation to one of the brain teasers you’ll stumble upon which we fittingly dubbed “the water puzzle”. Below is an animated GIF that hopefully covers the basics of how it works.

We also began prototyping a room we’ve elected to call “the obstacle course” (we have a way with names, what can we say!). Like the name implies, the room is supposed to put players through a series of challenges before they can reach the exit.
We’ve tried to mix some combat together with some short but sweet obstacle navigation that players will have to complete in succession.

What sets this room apart from all other rooms in the temple is that all seasons will be active at the same time. This makes the combat encounter especially interesting since all enemies will have access to their special abilities, paving way for some enjoyable chaos!

While the prototype is still in need of some tweeking and adjustment, Vilya went ahead and created the base graphics for the room in all its mixed up glory.

Click to view!

This week we’ve been working on two things: the main boss of the Temple of Seasons, as well as getting the first half of the temple ready for beta testing.

We want to keep the boss stuff hidden for now, but if you want a sneak-peek of what you’ll be facing, be sure to check Vilya’s blog in the coming days, as she’ll be uploading his boss portrait there.

In the meanwhile, here’s a bunch of expressions that Vilya has been making for the Temple of Seasons cutscenes:

She also finally got around to updating the library back in Evergrind City, which means you might eventually be able to go there as well:

One of the quirks that sets the Temple of Seasons apart from the rest of our dungeons is of course the Season Change ability we showcased a while back. While combat kind of takes a lead role, navigating through out the temple using the seasons will hopefully be a strong co-star!

Fred has been creating a bunch of different obstacles that block and open up different areas of the temple depending on the active season within the room.

The past couple of weeks have been spent with friends and family, but as of yesterday we are all gathered back on the island again! Today we had a customary work meeting at a local hamburger joint, where we discussed the last stretch of the temple, including the main boss.

Another thing we talked about was the state of the beta update cycles, where we feel we’ve fallen into a pattern of using Frontline as a Stable and Stable as some kind of Super Stable. Thus, we’re going to attempt increasing the update frequency of the Frontline beta, as well as the Stable beta.

The point of the Frontline beta was, after all, to allow users to test things as they were implemented. As a first step towards going back to this, we’re going to patch in the first and second part of the Season Temple sometime during the coming couple of weeks, including the Season Hydra miniboss.

We’ll get back to the proper Weekly Recap format next Monday, when we’ve gotten proper new material to show!

This week has been all about cleaning up and finishing some of the different areas and encounters we’ve been working on these last few weeks.

The hydra battle is more or less only missing some final polish and a good dose of balancing and tweaking (something Vilya talks a bit more in depth about here) before we can call it done. We’ve learned over the course of the production though that the saying “The last 10% takes 90% of the time” rings true a lot of the time so we might not be at the finish line just yet, but we’re certainly getting there!

The past week have also been host for the Alumni Days! The Alumni days is a week of lectures and workshops by former students at the University of Gotland, our old school, all of which are working in the game industry in some way.

Teddy was invited to do a lecture and a panel, and all three of us were all invited to a fancy three course dinner as well as a party with both former and present students! We don’t tend to go out that much so we had a blast just talking games and design with other like minded people.

Besides all that, it’s been business as usual. Fred has kept working on animations for the temple while Vilya still is locked up tight in the portrait factory!

This week we have continued working on the various fights that will take place in the Temple of Seasons!

We’ve played around with mixing the different enemy types and started tweaking their combos where we felt they were too powerful or not powerful enough! Here’s a few short GIFs featuring the test sessions in single player, which allows you to see most of the special attacks of the different enemies:

Click any GIF to view a bigger, more crisp version!

We’re currently looking into balancing the autumn combo, which is a bit too OP at the moment: the movespeed of the autumn knight inside one of those whirlwinds makes it impossible to dodge and as you can see, it chases you for quite a long time!

We’re also talking about adding another enemy type that will only serve to change the season of a room during combat. As the enemies become stronger when in a room that matches their season, an obvious strategy would be to eliminate one season first, then change the room into that season – removing all empowered enemies in the process. To counter that, we want the season changing enemy to be difficult to kill – most likely from being fast and hard to hit. You’d have to decide if it’s worth chasing it down and try dodging the other enemies while doing so, or deal with more difficult enemies overall.

Other than that, Fred has been making a bunch of decorative animations, and Vilya has kept working on the portraits (not too many left now)! Here’s a bunch of those, plus another card:

Things haven’t stood still just because there’s been Dreamhack Winter! We’ve been showing you a ton of in-progress gifs of the Season Hydra boss, but no boss is quite complete without a boss portrait, and so Vilya has come to the rescue:

The Temple of Seasons will feature no less than three boss battles, of which we’ve only really talked about one. Here’s the boss splash for another, which has already been mostly implemented:

We don’t want the regular enemies to be left hanging, though! As always, they get cards for the player to collect. Here’s the one for the Season Magicians:

While Vilya’s been at it creating these things, Fred has represented us over at Dreamhack Winter! Here we see a couple of innocent youths being corrupted by the grind:

And finally, here’s a shot of Fred secretly mind transferring a certain powerful Overpass boost to the members of Fnatic, which they would later be compelled to use in their match against LDLC: