Hello guys, Vilya here! The first week since the second part of Tai Ming was uploaded to Frontline has now gone past, and we’ve spent eagerly listening to your feedback (and fixing bugs)! Thank you to everyone who left comments and suggestions, we’ll add and improve a bunch of things before we consider this part properly done.

Some of you have already noticed that after finishing the first zone, it’s possible to get stuck, with the time warp portals disappearing. While this isn’t quite working as intended, the truth is that once you’ve finished an area, you’ll only be able to return to it in the present time.

We have a couple of reasons for this, and it wasn’t an easy choice to make. I mean, of course it would have been great if you could always go back to finish any puzzles or secrets you might have missed. On the other hand, we felt like the area would have a bigger impact once you realize that when you’ve seen all there is to the story here, you can’t go back to talk to the people again. They have passed on already and belong only in a distant past which you shouldn’t have had access to in the first place.

We also didn’t want the player to feel frustrated because they can’t go back to, say, the first zone, and simply try to convince Zhamla or Sizou to change their ways once you realize how events in that zone turned Zhamla from a young, optimistic boy into a serious and rather obsessed young man.

We could have just simply not mentioned the fact, or thrown in a line about not changing past events, but again, this way felt like it’d have more of an impact.

Now, obviously you’re not supposed to get stuck anywhere in the present. So how are we gonna solve the fact that there are a ton of blockades that you need time travel to get past?

Cue this guy:

This fellow is a traveling adventurer (with dreams of becoming a Collector, perhaps?) who you’ll meet many times on your journey. Once you’ve finished the first part of Tai Ming, he’ll arrive to move things out of the way and create a passage that you can use as well. Once you’re done with the second zone, he’ll move on and do the same there.

So what about all the treasures you might have missed on your first play through? Worry not, you’ll be able to get them later in the game, one way or another (we have a bunch of ideas), so missing an item in Tai Ming won’t affect your 100% completion if you manage to find it somewhere else later.

After all, hundreds of years have passed since the time when Tai Ming was a bustling town, and it’s not unlikely that once you stop messing around with the time jumps, someone simply moved the items somewhere else.

With this new information, it might be worth going through Tai Ming one more time to see if you missed any secrets, would you say? Head out and collect! The 100% completion awaits you!

Next up, in celebration of having completed my part of Tai Ming’s second zone, I decided to take a quick break from the asian theme and move back to Evergrind City and its surrounding fields!

This map here is in fact the one that can be found north of the farm, in the western Evergrind Fields! It’ll be the key to opening the final dungeon, but until you figure out how to do that it’s just a bunch of resting ruins in the middle of the woods.

For this area, I began with a very simple sketch just to get a feel of the layout. Then I added a bunch of the surrounding props (trees, and the like) with our editor, before creating the new stuff:

Then, it’s on to making the actual ruins:

And finally, adding all the details to bring the place together:

While this map likely won’t be implemented until all three zones of Tai Ming are completed, it’s been on my mind for a long time, and I’m sure the “this way is blocked until we implement temple x” notice has bothered a lot of you guys as well! This way, at least you’ll be able to move around almost everywhere (with the exception of the desert and onwards, which hasn’t been added yet of course) without annoying notices!

And now, time to start working on Zone03. We’ve already begun prototyping most of the area, with the exception of the final two rooms (one which will house the Mimic boss, and one which will feature… something else).

Our very first prototype consists of extremely simple black & white sketches, where I just draw whatever I think would look cool. I mainly freestyle the size of each map, but try to keep in mind certain things like whether there will be battles taking place, or where the camera will pause in cutscenes and such.

Once I’ve sketched whatever I feel is important to size-check or run by the others, I give the sketches to Teddy who adds them to the game engine. He won’t add any colliders or anything at this point, but often he’ll make sure the doors work in cases like this where we need to run through more than one map connected to one another.

Then, me, Teddy and Fred run through the maps in multiplayer, talking about what we think as we go along. Are the rooms big enough? Will there be enough room to fight? Does the camera position well?

Often I’ve come up with ideas for what should happen in the rooms, either before or while I make the sketches, and in this multiplayer test we tend to brainstorm a lot as well. We’ll ask ourselves things like “wouldn’t it be cool if this happened here”, or “wouldn’t it be nice to have a painting of x there”, among other things.

In the case above, I made a design with 2 tables, but as we talked about what the flashback orb will show in this room, we decided it’d be better to have it take place at one long table instead. We talked about how long the table should be, and two of us had to act as indicators so I could take a screenshot and add a table approx. the size the characters show (plus some more decorations):

After going through each of the rooms in a similar way, with us talking about the sketches and me editing them as per what we decide, we’ve got a decent “whitebox” version of the place. There are no final graphics, but since we’re satisfied with the size, it’s possible to start adding colliders as well as prototyping enemy encounters.

Since this zone is only four rooms, two outdoor areas and a boss fight, we certainly hope finishing this place will be faster than zone02. There will be a lot of epic things happening here though, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see how many super difficult animations Fred will have to make before we’re satisfied…. Stay tuned ;)

Finally, the second zone’s on Frontline! It only took about 4 months guys!! ;) However, if my (Vilya’s) playthrough of the area is any indication (1 hour 20 minutes), it’s a decent amount of playtime for that amount of work, at least compared to our previous areas.

I know it’s hard to believe, but our workspeed per playtime has actually increased with this dungeon, though it’s pretty huge and ends up taking a long time to finish anyway ;P

Anyway! We’d love to hear how long it takes you to play the area, if you got stuck anywhere, what you liked/disliked and, of course, any bugs you found! Please spam away, we’d love to hear everything (and feel free to link us any cool Let’s Plays of the area, as seeing how people think and try to interact is extra important in this area).

Here’s a bunch of the stuff we made for the second zone, before we released it this weekend:

First up, the final room of Puzzle World! Part of this area will be looking over the sea, with the Pillar Mountains (among other things) in the background. Because of how incredibly long it took to paint the backdrop, the video I recorded got super long, so I decided to divide it in parts:

This first part is all about the actual area your character will be able to move around in. It consists of the same type of environmental decorations as the Mount Bloom outskirts, with the addition of some rocks and details from Evergrind Fields and Tai Ming.

Second part of this scene is all about the backdrop! And what else would it contain, but your old home, the Pillar Mountains?

Painting this took a long while, much longer than I’d hoped, seeing as it’s mostly water and a few islands! But since I’m used to painting smaller props rather than distant backgrounds, it took some time to get used to the change :)

Once this was finished, we added a bunch of birds and some clouds floating in the background as well:

I mentioned before that I was gonna make standing versions of the old and worn statues. This is pretty much to make it easier on us, as we don’t want to worry about where to put which statue if two would fall on top of each other. Instead, they’ll remain upright:

One key part of the puzzle is to deal with the glass box somehow, and so I had to make a version of it that’s completely smashed as well! Some pretty fun stuff, lots of glass pieces :)

This grave has a bunch of flowers that stand out from the rest, and it’s for good reason, relating to a quest:

This room felt a little too clean, so I went back to it and added a bunch of planks and the remains of the poor old flowers. Likely nothing would remain of the plant this long since it died, but as long as it looks better this way, I’m all for it ;)

I also added a bunch of rocks surrounding a box in the water next to what we call “Granny’s house”. This is to signify that you cannot move this box (while you can move a bunch of others):

The current box also looked a bit too fresh and clean for the present version, so I made another version of the box(es) to suit the time jump better:

There’s a strange puzzle in the upper parts of this map (which isn’t completely shown in this picture), and one part to the puzzle is that you cannot move things around in the present. As such, I made a version of the puzzle block that wasn’t able to withstand the test of time, and has crumbled too much for you to be able to push it around (video game logic)!

Seeing as the alcoholic beverage hidden in this room was turned into an ale rather than a wine, the color was changed to better suit the drink in question!

While Bag has made do with the same faces for a long, long time, it was finally time to add another couple of expression! Well, in fact, we just needed the one, but due to some miscommunication I misunderstood the mood asked for, and we ended up with two instead! Maybe the other one will have some use in the future… :)

This lady isn’t too happy about her daughter being interested in the strange Flying Fortress people visiting town, so she had to get a more displeased expression as well:

We also realized we needed to block the way south in the Path Puzzle’s past state! This was done by adding a bunch of boxes:

Whatever happened to this guard’s hat?! I guess you’ll have to find out by playing through the zone! In either case, he needed a portrait without the hat, so I made one:

Due to a slight rewrite, we decided to open up the door to the Puzzle World WIP, and add a small sign letting you know that something is ahead:

Previously for the Monkey mini game we used a placeholder key, which was actually a much smaller one that was resized in Photoshop. Good thing we remembered to swap it out for this new sprite:

A line of rocks were added to show you where you cannot push certain blocks that can be found on the lower level of this zone. You can (and should) still run past the rocks yourself though:

Due to some grim times up ahead in Tai Ming, we decided it was time to increase the number of tombstones in the cemetery greatly, too… Whatever could be happening? The answer awaits you in the third zone!

Finally, two new zone titles: one for the second zone and one for the third (which I, as I write this post, have actually started working on already! Wohoo!)

…Actually, there was another portrait added, as well! :)

This is Nolea, a character that’s a homage to the main character of CrossCode:

While being based on Lea visually, this character is quite different from her CrossCode counterpart. In fact, she’s a cyborg built built by the Flying Fortress crew with multiple personality and vocabulary settings. How advanced!

She’ll be hanging out with the other Flying Fortress guys in zone02, demonstrating the newly invented Phase Shift techniques.

For Nolea, I had to make two different expressions, but as I was creating them I had a hard time picking between a couple of variations, so I ended up making 4 instead. I’m still not sure which 2 actually appears in the game, as I told Teddy decide as he implemented them, and I haven’t talked to in-game Nolea since then…

This week, we’ll likely take care of any bugs that appear through the frontline testing, as well as add another bunch of polish. I’ll also continue working on the third zone of Tai Ming, which will conclude your adventures in this mountain. How exciting!

Until next week! :)

We’re finally getting closer to getting the second zone up and running in Frontline! As such, we’ve all been very busy adding the final touches to the zone and bug testing the heck out of it all.

We have some exciting preview GIFs to show you, but first, some more expressions!

The third batch of expressions features a varied crew of characters. There’s the father of the guards, three collectors and a somewhat familiar face: that of Montbel, the famous chef and bartender of Tai Ming:

The fourth and final (for now) batch of expressions features an accessory saleswoman, Faita from zone one, who you could say has fallen on hard times – at least if you go by her expressions, a male priest, the greedy owner of Puzzle World, the visitors from Flying Fortress and the gardener from zone one, who is still tending to the gardens, only this time in zone two!

So, these last few days we got to do something awesome: we actually play tested Tai Ming’s second zone!! It’s true, after many months of working on this place, Teddy put enough together that it was possible for us to run through the entire thing!

For me (Vilya) the zone took 1 hour and 20 minutes to complete, but then I tried to talk with most people (gotta double check that dialogue) and had a slightly underleveled character. On the other hand, I knew exactly where to go and what to do, seeing as I’ve been part of designing everything. It’ll be interesting to hear how long it’ll take for you guys!

After running through the entire thing each of us took notes on things we liked and things we wanted to change, as well as any bugs we found. Luckily, we were mostly in agreement that very little needs to change – in truth we rather feel like Evergrind City needs to change, since this town is much more vibrant and alive compared to the capital… I guess we managed to overdo things as usual.

Among the things we’ve yet to add, there’s 2-3 flashback orbs, with cutscenes that haven’t been made yet. In these orbs more of Zhamlas story will be revealed. Who is this strange child/young man anyway, and how come he’s so important to the story?!

We also made a list of graphical assets for me and Fred to add. My list mainly consists of increasing the number of decorative sprites and more expressions. There’s also a ton of “minor” fixes, like making sure some of the portraits don’t go outside the dialogue box, like below:

This week will be all about last minute fixes, as we hope to be able to upload the second zone to Frontline next weekend! Not 100% sure we’ll actually make it, but that’s our aim at this moment. Here’s to hoping everything continues to go smoothly :)

See you next week – hopefully with a new patch uploaded!

Hey guys!! It’s been another week, and it’s me, Vilya, back to bring you another recap of what’s been going on in the Pixel Ferrets office!

Last week I made the past version of the final Puzzle World room – this week it’s time to transform it into its present version! Since this is the last room before you manage to get outside again, I got to add some vines again! Long time no see:

I also got to paint a lot of cracks on the huge glass thing, which also is something I love doing. Nothing is more soothing than listening to music (or an audiobook) and just painting crack after crack… Well, since we wanted what’s inside to be somewhat visible I decided not to go too crazy with it. Not sure how it’ll turn out in the end though, maybe I can add a few more before calling it a day… :)

Next up, I should start making the statues you’ll use for this room’s puzzle! First, a video showing the progress of making the past versions:

Since the progression from standing to fallen statues happen as you time travel, there’s no need for animations. As such, I was also able to make the present, crumbled ones:

To make it easier seeing where any given statue needs to go, we decided to keep their boxes on the floor (who also got slightly different dimensions since the last post) in the present, in various states of decay. The alternative would have been to have the statues fall with base and all, but we believe this makes it easier to read which statue is where on the puzzle floor.

There’s still two things I need to make for this room. First we need standing, decayed version of the statues for present times, as the statues won’t fall if they’re standing next to a statue that would block the direction it would have fallen in. This is mostly to make it easier for us – instead of having to figure out how to stack the statues on top of one another, they just won’t break as severely if it means they would have fallen on top of another statue.

I also need to make a broken version of the glass box in the lower left corner, so it’s possible to let out the statu– whatever’s in there. But, that’s for another day!

Next up, as Teddy has been working on the cutscenes in Tai Ming’s second zone I decided to go over the dialogue and start making a bunch of expressions so that can be properly finished!

First up is Tessen, the little girl from the first zone who has grown up to become a young priestess of Grindea:

She’s both happy to see you, and has some serious worries on her mind. Wonder what those are about..

Next up, Zhamla:

Since his adoptive father’s speech about being strong, Zhamlas life has taken quite a serious turn, and unfortunately there’s not a lot of room for positive emotions in his life nowadays.

Speaking of adoptive fathers, Zisou’s life has actually become a bit more lax these days, so he can afford a smile or two – but there’s still room for some quite serious expressions in there as well:

The second batch of expressions features four different characters:

First, the dam manager, who has quite a bunch of expressions, as you can see! He has both a serious(ly annoyed) and goofy side, and quite a peculiar quest to bring these expressions out!

The ancient Quest Master, Quinton’s ancestor(?), has a few more expressions than his present day counterpart. He has added both surprise and happiness to his range of emotions!

Mana, the lady with the dog in the first zone, has become older and grayer, but is still quite the happy person, while young mister Go, still is quite miserable in his adult form. He was the kid who lost the key in the first zone, remember? Poor Verment, he has had quite the tough life!

Finally, some Caveling animations from Fred! What are they up to in Tai Ming?!

Another week, and more Puzzle World!

Now, the battle room! As you might guess from the name, this is where a bunch of battles will take place, likely an encounter with several waves (though we haven’t decided on any specifics yet):

For this room, I kind of wanted to add a mascot of some sort. A lot of theme parks use mascots here and there for decoration, and I thought this place shouldn’t be no different. And what better shape than a puzzle piece? Perhaps I should add some more, maybe of different shapes and colors, to other rooms!

The floor is kind of bare in this room, as it’s a fighting room and we don’t want you to run into a bunch of colliders as you battle (cause that’s super annoying). I did add some boxes to the corners though, since I didn’t want the room to look completely empty. Since this place was never really finished, I think it makes sense that boxes with supplies for the continued development of the theme park still remain here and there.

Next room is the monkey challenge room, which has been previewed in a previous post. Here, the player will try to steal back a key from a gang of annoying monkeys, intent on keeping the key to themselves!

As with the fighting room, the key to this room is to keep the floor as clean (from colliders) as possible, since you’ll spend your time in here trying to beat up and chasing enemies back and forth. Since we had a prototype for this room already, I kept the same size as in the test. It worked well enough when we tried it, so no point changing a size that already works!

I did shorten the distance to the exit though: such a long corridor didn’t make a lot of sense, and would – in my opinion – only look visually worse than the shorter distance :)

And now, the final Puzzle World room!! This one is the Path Puzzle room, where you have to move a set of statues around in the past so that they are at the right place in present day…

While a lot of these graphics were already made and reused from previous rooms, I had to do some pretty cool new stuff for this one! For one, this room needed two levels, which meant I had to make a railing of sorts to make it easier to tell the levels apart:

I also had to make that big glass thingy, containing something you need to figure out how to get out of there! And it was a lot of fun: shiny things are the best to make!

Now, as the third zone of Tai Ming – and the final challenge(s) of the dungeon – draws near, we decided it was time to have a meeting to flesh out the final boss of the dungeon: an ancient Mimic!

Pretty much since we started developing Grindea, we’ve known we wanted a boss mimic somewhere in the world, and once we knew the third “temple” would be an ancient town where time travel is the focus, we couldn’t think of a better place for our Mimic!

The time travel aspect of this place helped us come up with one of the key features of this boss battle: it will be divided into three phases, where each phase ends with a time shift, during which the Mimic gains strenght. Basically, you start the battle in the past, and once you’re close to defeating the first, young, version of the mimic, you’ll get sent forward in time, where a bunch of years have passed. The mimic, unaffected by your time jumping, will have grown in size and power over the years, and poses a bigger challenge…

During the first phase, the mimic is little more than a jumpkin – but in the shape of a chest. It will have one or two special attacks, but this is definitely the easiest stage, and should be over pretty quickly.

In the second phase, the mimic has grown to the size of Giga Slime (roughly). The battle will remind you of that boss as well, as the mimic jumps around the battlefield, doing damage with its massive body. It also has a series of special attacks where it spits a ton of coins on the ground in different patterns – which may hurt you as they land – and goes to eat them up straight away, dealing damage to anyone in its path. Sometimes, it will spit out a powerup of some sort as well – and if you fail to destroy it before the Mimic eats it up again, it will gain a powerboost against you. Like Giga Slime, the Mimic will also have an attack resembling the hammer-attack of Giga Slime; basically a regular attack it can pull if you stand too close to it for too long. Only instead of producing a slime hammer, it will use any of the weapons inside of it (or its tongue)!

In the third phase, the boss has grown to a massive size, and is now static. It will attack you using any of its many hatches to send out weapons of various kinds against you. It also has a special attack where it blows you to the opposite end of the screen and sends out a ton of things from its inside! These things might be enemies (from anywhere in the game), barrels, crates, items, money – basically anything you can think of.

This is one ancient mimic, and it’s been stuffed with things over the years!

Since the boss is divided into three different phases, we haven’t given each phase too many attacks. As we start prototyping this battle, it’s possible we’ll add more, but I think this is one of those bosses where the battle might be challenging enough even without 500x different attack patterns! I guess we’ll see – either case I’m very excited to see this in the game.

No game set in a fantasy world is complete without a mimic, right? :)

Hello guys! It’s been another week, and now I (Vilya) am back with another recap of the big things we’ve been working on :D

This week, the work on Puzzle World continues! Next step is to transform the Statue Room into it’s sorry present state. Since this will be the first room to be turned into a present version, it’s extra important to get everything right since a bunch of the props, such as the planks, will be reused in upcoming rooms.

Here’s a GIF showing the process:

As usual with transforming rooms or environments from past (fresh & new) to present (old and worn), most of it is changing colors. But just turning a bright yellow into a dull brown won’t cut it in many cases, such as the door: as wood grows old, it will get worn down and cracks may appear. Therefore I added more lines in the wood, as well as holes here and there, where I imagine the wood has been broken over time:

Next room is a little different! It’s been sponsored by the Flying Fortress crew, and so it has been decorated to look like a room in Flying Fortress – only with wallpapers and a fake floor… :)

When creating this room, I had two options. Either I use the already-made texture of the Flying Fortress walls & floor, or I make a new one. It’s likely people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, since it was so long since you went through the Flying Fortress in the main story – but I still opted to make new graphics.

I did this for two reasons: one, it gave me the opportunity to make the texture look even more like a wallpaper texture – instead of looking exactly like it does in Flying Fortress (which is built of what’s at least supposed to be real rocks), I could make a softer texture which would be easier to pass off as wallpaper. Second, the Flying Fortress graphics are very old at this point, and I worried that adding such an old texture among all the new stuff would look jarring – I’ve developed a lot as an artist since that time, so the difference in quality and style is quite big.

The smaller screen to the right will hold a message about the room being sponsored by the Flying Fortress – the big one to the right will either have something cool animated by Fred, or a graphic representation of the flying Fortress made by me. Or maybe a graphic representation of the Flying Fortress made by Fred or something cool (non-animated) made by me – who knows! :)

Since this room is already quite gloomy to begin with, it was a bit of a challenge to darken and dull the colors down without everything becoming too dark for the present version. Instead of going too crazy with the darkening effects, I decided to ruin more of the wallpaper around the areas where you’ll run around, having the real wall show through:

After finishing the past version, I added a pair of boxes that block the exit to the right. In this version however, the boxes are moved (since you enter the room in this timeline) and instead block your path to the top part of the room. To get there, you’ll need to complete the phase shift puzzle!

And yes, for those who noticed the difference between the Past and Present version: we decided to change the design of the left platform a little, as the previous version was a little hard to read for some people. The previous version is to the left, the new version to the right:

Next, after Fred finished adding some NPCs to the inn (left), I took over and added some props that I thought would suit them:

The girl on the right is a bit underage, so instead of drinking she’s having a meal while studying hard to become a Collector like her sister (which will also be added to the table later on). Faita, the sword teacher from the first zone, is kind of drowning her disbelief at being second best at everything with a glass of unnamed alcohol (or is it soda?) ;)

Meanwhile, instead of cleaning up the bar, Montbel the owner (who isn’t present in the picture) has left all kinds of bottles and bowls on it for visual effect. ‘Aint he nice?

Speaking of NPCs, Fred has kept working on adding more of them to Tai Ming’s second zone, so here’s another bunch:

Finally, let’s end the week with a portrait! I actually forgot I still had two more to make for the second Tai Ming zone. Guess I got a little bit too excited about starting to make backgrounds for Puzzle World!

This guy is a hat salesman, having his shop set up outside the ancient Collector’s HQ. Like the hat salesman in Evergrind City, he has a kind of elegance to him! I guess it comes with the job, huh?

This week I (Vilya) have finally started working on Puzzle World, the small extension of Tai Ming’s second zone set in the north! It’s been a blast – but first, let’s take a look at something I forgot: the Giant Thorn-Worm boss portrait!

Based on Fred’s sprite, the Giant Thorn-Worm boss portrait is pretty straight forward, as it’s.. well, just a worm. Of course, it had to be adjusted in some ways: for one, it needed to be a lot longer than it is in the sprite, or it’d barely reach above the title text! I also added a few more spikes to its back.

Other than that, I tried to stay true to the sprite. Perhaps I could have added some texture to its skin, and maybe I will at a later stage – but I think it’s important that the boss portrait resembles the actual sprite as much as possible, especially when the sprite is as big as the Giant Thorn-Worm is.

As for the boss title itself, the main title will be “Giant Thorn-Worm”, with “The Threat from Below” as its sub-title. This is actually a reference to the movie Tremors, which was known as “Hotet från Underjorden” (The Threat From Below/the Underground) when it came to Sweden!

And now…. It’s time to begin! Using the sketches from last week, I’m going to create the backgrounds for each of the Puzzle World rooms. It’s gonna be a lot of fun, since this place will be totally different from everything else in Tai Ming graphics wise: bright colors and crazy color combinations everywhere! Wohoo!

To celebrate a completely new set of graphics, here’s a video showing the process of creating this room! Videos are definitely more fun to do when there are a lot of new graphics involved, so I’ll probably do one or two graphics for each new area, rather than spam a ton of videos of me recoloring and reshaping previously made objects from now on:

 

After finishing recording the video, I decided to add and change a few minor things before the finished room. First up, moving the question mark poster to the front – in the back it could be anything, and I think it’s unnecessary to confuse players about it:

Next. adding some balloons. I mean, it’s a theme park, after all – so it’s not really complete without a few balloons. Right?

Third, in the original sketch I had a “cool effect” around the first door of the theme park, which felt a bit redundant after I completed the rest of the room. However, after giving it some thought, I wanted to try creating it after all – in the worst case we’ll simply remove the effect again, but for now I kind of like it:

Here’s the finished first room after these changes:

And now: the first actual puzzle room of this brand-new theme park! This one is focused on statues, but solving it won’t be as easy as you might have thought – you see, the guys building the puzzle haven’t actually finished it yet, so you’ll have to figure out another way to get out of here.. :)

A step-by-step GIF of the design! Since most of the wall and floor stuff has been made already, there’s a lot less to do in this room. The banners are actually reused from the HQ (though resized and remade just a tiny bit), while the pillars and the puzzle parts on the floor had to be made from scratch.

Next, some half-built puzzle blocks in wood, lying around on the floor:

These puzzle blocks are made in wood and are supposed to be based on the ‘real’ puzzle blocks you find out and about in the world of Grindea. However, I chose to make these in wood so that when you travel to the present to fight enemies, there aren’t a bunch of puzzle blocks blocking your way as you battle – they have decayed and only planks will be left on the floor, which have no colliders.

It also serves to remind people that the guy who build this theme park is kind of cheap and would rather build the puzzle blocks in a cheap material than order the more expensive plastic- or stone versions… ;)

Finished version of the room:

Now, after focusing so long on Tai Ming’s second zone, it’s finally nearing completion and we can look on to the third and final zone! As such, we had a meeting where we discussed exactly how it will look and what will take place here…

Since the second zone has become quite big and advanced, we agreed that it’s best to keep the third zone smaller and a lot more straight forward, in order to pace things well. When you first enter this zone, you will see a weird celebration and a bunch of strange things happening in front of a lot of people outside an ancient shrine! I know I’m vague, but it’s gonna be really cool if we get it right!

Next, you’ll be sent back to the present, where you’ll make your way through the shrine itself. Here you’ll be sent back and forth in time seemingly randomly – the time warp thing has gone crazy it seems! There will be some battles and some cutscenes explaining what’s happening next, and things are getting quite scary..!

Finally, you’ll reach your destination: outside, on the other end of the shrine, is a meadow with an altar at the end. At the altar, you’ll find an artefact, and not one but two epic fights draw close…

I’m so excited to begin making the third zone now that it’s been designed much more thoroughly and I almost feel like the end of the temple is within grasp! Of course, there’s still a lot of stuff left (we’re still not done with the second zone, after all!), but having it all designed really helps a lot with looking ahead :)

Oh yeah, meanwhile, Fred has been finished one NPC after another! Soon all of Tai Ming will be full of people :D

Hello guys! Tai Ming’s second zone is finally coming together: this week I (Vilya) have finally finished up the last backgrounds (except for the Puzzle Cave, which we’ll talk a bit later in the post)! Aside from a few fixes here and there, the backgrounds are now officially done for this area, and “all” that needs to be added now are a ton of NPCs, and of course, the cutscenes.. :)

Let’s take a look at this week’s main tasks:

I quit making the second zone’s outdoor transition from past to present around the HQ, as we hadn’t decided if the area needed to become bigger to properly house the Giant Thorn-Worm battle. Since we decided to keep things as they are, it was finally time to get a move on and finish things up!

First up is the area around the dam, where you can adjust the water levels of Tai Ming’s second zone. As with all other present versions, it’s time to demolish everything:

Next, the HQ itself, along with the yard in front! At this point it’s actually not 100% finished – I’m gonna break the wall up a bit so you can move through the left side in the next step (and in the future I might break the right corner a bit for visual effect as well:

Finally, the area near the exit to the third zone! The main focus on this part of the job was the doorway to the third zone. In the past version, the door is open: here it needs to be closed, until you’ve gathered 3 emblems that activates the door opening mechanism. So, the emblems of the past needed to be removed, the door lowered, and some kind of ruin added to the whole thing:

In the end, I also had to add a ton of stuff in the editor to serve as colliders: this part of the area will be blocked unless you get here from the right time rift. Right not some of the items aren’t correctly sorted, but they will be once the game engine does its work!

It’s likely I’ll add more stuff here later if we feel like the blockade is too thin, but that will be in a future mixed bag update, in that case :)

Here’s the final result, for now:

Meanwhile, Fred has been busy filling this area with the NPCs living here! Tai Ming has attracted all kinds of people, ranging from collectors, priests, merchants and bar owners! Some might resemble characters from the present: distant relatives, perhaps?

Now that I’m finished with my share of the Tai Ming 2nd zone backgrounds, it’s time to move on to something different: the puzzle cave in the north part of the map! We’ve actually made a very basic sketch of the area, which includes all the rooms and what you’ll face there.

Be aware of spoilers if you look at the map below or it’s explanation, if you prefer to explore the amusement park on your own:

I already mentioned the rooms in a previous post, but now we’ve actually designed the rooms! The sketches above are very messy and basic, but they show in which order the rooms will appear, as well as and approximation of how they’ll look.

Room 1 is an introduction room where you’ll meet the owner of the amusement park and his workers.

Room 2 is the Ancient Statue Puzzle, where you’ll have to use statues get to Room 3, where regular battles will take place.

Room 4 is sponsored by Flying Fortress and features a Phase Shift puzzle (shown here), Room 5 is where the Monkey Madness takes place, and Room 6 is the “Path Puzzle” shown in the same post as the Phase Shift puzzle.

Room 7 is where you’ll find your mysterious treasure, as well as a hopefully fancy view! I both look forward to and dread making this map. Good thing I can make the other 6 first ;)

Next week I’ll start making the above rooms, while Teddy and Fred work on adding more NPCs and cutscenes to the village! In the next post we’ll take a sneak peek at what our plans are for the third zone as well, since we’re drawing ever closer to finishing this second part of the temple. Stay tuned! :)

This week, we’ve finished up the final interior of Tai Ming’s second zone: the monkey lab! Here is the past version:

Before designing this place, I (Vilya) had a talk with Fred and Teddy about what level of technology we wanted this place to have. We had plenty of options: we could either go full Flying Fortress style with lasers and very high technology, or we could go more primitive and ancient-oriented.

Since we wanted this area to feel quite modern for Tai Ming (making it stand out and all), we decided to keep it kind of high-tech, but not Flying Fortress laser-level. So there’s steel bars, lots of documentation, some glass vials and strange potions, some which will be animated and added later on by Fred!

After completing the above version, we decided to have one big cage rather than two small, with two monkeys in it. We also added some cracks to illustrate where a hole will be in the present, as well:

For the Present version, the walls & floor need to become more dull & dark, the glass windows have broken, papers have been shredded… and the poor monkeys who were stuck in the cage have died (unless… you decide to let them out) :(

Aside from these interiors, we also added a bunch of smaller stuff: changing the brown chests into purple ones on the banners in the past, to reflect the fact that the chests in Tai Ming will, in fact, be purple:

We also wanted to Tai Ming-ify the doors inside the ancient Collector’s HQ a bit, so I added some fancy door frame decorations to them:

Just for fun and some flavor, an optional chest has appeared in Tai Ming’s present state, as well! But however will you be able to reach it with all the rocks blocking the way?

There’s a couple of new characters, as well! This ancient version of Quinton (an ancestor, perhaps?) is the Quest Master of Tai Ming’s Collector’s HQ. He’ll give you one or two quests you need to complete in the town before you can proceed into the next zone:

Those of you who paid attention to the text screens in the Phase Puzzle course in Mount Bloom should be familiar with Tonee, who wrote about the course in some detail!

Well, here she is, visiting Tai Ming with her engineer friend from last week:

What they’re doing there? Showing off the latest Phase Shifting technology of course! These things don’t fund themselves, you know ;)

Finally, here’s another giant Thorn-Worm, the ULTIMATE version, made & animated by Fred:

How much worse can that fight get, really?! Whew…

Next week, I’ll finish up the graphics for Tai Ming’s second zone, while Fred works on some much needed NPC sprites for the area! Next after that, Puzzle World, the short mini puzzle-dungeon “hidden” in the north of the zone. Stay tuned! :)

After getting back from some days off, it’s only natural that you (or your team) have thought about a bunch of small improvements that could be made! So, after getting back last week, Vilya got straight back into fixing a bunch of things in Tai Ming’s second zone!

First, as we implemented more and more of the Tai Ming 2nd zone backgrounds, we came to realize we wanted to change some things around. One of those things were the placement of the cave entrance seen below:

Since this cave will be a puzzle cave, we thought it’d be a little bit funny if it was next to the graveyard, in order to illustrate how poor the owner’s business choices are. But we found it got a little bit too crowded, so we decided to move the entrance further to the right, and add a small fence to illustrate the end of the graveyard.

In the present, the puzzle cave has closed since many years, and instead the path to it has been filled with new tombstones:

Another thing we wanted to change was the windows of the monkey lab. Since this building is where a lot of scientific experiments take place, we want to highlight that this building is different from the rest, and in a way, more modern. We already have the more industrialized chimneys, but we also decided to add glass windows rather than the hollow ones from before:

And in the present, as time has passed and worn things down, the glass windows have broken and fallen apart:

Next up is of course finishing the remaining backgrounds needed for the area, including the ancient Collector’s HQ! When designing this place, we wanted it to resemble the Collector’s HQ in Evergrind City, only smaller since it doesn’t make sense for it to be as big as that one gameplay wise (you won’t really do anything in here except fetch a quest or two). So let’s take a look at what the Evergrind City HQ looks like:

And now, the ancient HQ:

We’re considering editing the doors a bit so they’ll fit in better with the Tai Ming theme. Also, there will be guards placed outside the doors like in Evergrind City, so you won’t be able to enter (though I guess it’s kind of rare to be able to walk through closed doors in this game anyway). The doors are only there to make the place seem bigger than it is, really!

As for characters in this area, there’s just a tiny amount of portraits left now! Of course, they will all need a bunch of expressions, but there won’t be too many all-new characters! This guy is the engineer that helped design the phase shift puzzle elements that are used in the course in Mt: Bloom:

We know gave a lot of people a headache (at least the more difficult, optional stage), so perhaps this is the guy you should blame? :)

Next, this fellow here is the key to a very old mystery: why do the guards in Tai Ming all look alike? The answer is simple – they’re all brothers! And their father is non other than this scientist, who currently works in the monkey lab:

When making this portrait we used the guard portrait as a base and recolored and repainted where needed, to make them look similar enough to be related.

Now, whether there’s a similar explanation to why the guards in Evergrind City look the same as well remains to be seen… :)

Finally, a little sneak peek of our next prototyping business: another ‘puzzle’ in the puzzle cave. Only it’s not a puzzle: instead you’re in the present, and the key you need keeps getting snatched away by monkeys:

How annoying, right?! Well, don’t worry! You’ll get the key eventually. At least, once we’ve finished the puzzle cave and all it’s background, which will be what we’ll jump into once we’ve finished up the second zone properly. See you next week! :)