A whole bunch of icons for new items and perks is needed, as well as two new housing items you can unlock by completing Arcade Mode and trading in your golden essence, featuring two different types of Grindea statues:

 Shadier Merchant is another character that will get his very own designed room in Arcade Mode, so let’s give him a bit of a spicier background, shall we:

 Maracus will make an appearance in Arcade Mode as well, and as such, it’s time to tweak his room a bit to make sure it can be integrated into Arcade Mode, allowing for exits in three directions:

Finally, let’s take a look at the first phase of the Grindea battle!

Now we’re winding down for a Christmas break (this is a recap so the posts actually ended on the 24th!) Happy holidays to you all!

We will now have a short christmas break before being back to work as normal on the 3rd of January! See you all then :)

This week it’s time to start finishing up Grindea’s battle area, so let’s take a look at how that’s going! In this first part, I’m adding the basic area, the stones and some green details around it:

 And here, we’re adding some more details in the shape of a bunch of isles surrounding the area! Of course, there will be clouds and stuff as well:

Something that’s not quite the Grindea battle floor but closely related is the bazaar that you’ll reach right before it, where you’ll get one final chance to purchase some new things and swap stuff around. Let’s take a look at what that will look like:

Now, with one of the Golden Essence rewards being that our very own musician Riley comes to town to let you pick and choose what music is playing, we of course needed a new interface, including a new shop title! Let’s have a look:

And now, a first sneak peek at the cutscene introducing Grindea to the player! We’re still tweaking this, but it will give you an idea of where we’re going with this:

Next up, we decided to give this cabin a bit of an upgrade decoration wise, to put some emphasis on the fact that there’s a weird circus troupe thing going on in this mini challenge where you need to light torches:

And as mentioned previously, good old Kailan from Flying Fortress needs a ghostified portrait:

Some minor fixes for this room to make it look slightly more interesting! This used to be designed as a boss room for when you were still supposed to battle the Captain twice, but since we replaced the second captain battle with a battle against the eye boss, this room could get some more decorations without it distracting your focus in a boss battle:

As part of a very strange thing happening towards the end of the ghost ship, a huge moon looking thing needed to be made as well! Whatever in the world could we need this for? Wait and see! :)

With work now progressing to the creepy Startington portion, we realized just making the houses fall apart without touching the surrounding areas would look a bit empty, so we decided to make the entire area surrounding each building covered in the darkness once you complete its challenge: