Another week has gone by, in which a new fronline update was released! In this update you will battle a mini-boss and investigate a suspicious character… For full patch notes, check the game client or this thread!

The patch leaves Evergrind HQ in a mess…

We’d love to hear your feedback on this new encounter and the surrounding story elements, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or on the forums!

Moving on, though, Vilya has been doing some improvements to the Mt. Bloom maps now that they’re finally about to be added to the game:

Basically, tons of new greenery and details!

Meanwhile, Fred was busy creating the mess that is the Collector’s HQ now that the patch is up, including a cleaning Wedge which will be added in a later update!

Next up, adding colliders & enemies to Mt. Bloom, as well as prototyping a bunch of challenges you’ll be doing there! :)

This week, we’ve been finishing things up for another frontline update coming later this week! This means Teddy has been busy dealing with balancing, bug fixing and multiplayer support for said portion of the game, and Fred has made some final animations for the upcoming battle:

Vilya also needed to finish something for this update, and unfortunately for Master Ivy, her task was to create a ruined version of Master Ivy’s office:

Once she had completed that task, she went on to improve one of the old Mt:Bloom outskirts maps, adding some greenery and vines to it:

And speaking of Mt:Bloom Outskirts, we kind of need a map from where you can enter the actual mountain, right? So that was made as well:

Since creating WIP GIFs was pretty fun to do, here’s one featuring the creation of the above map as well:

This week we hope to finish things up with the boss battle so that we can update frontline, and Vilya will start getting the Mt:Bloom backgrounds ready for implementation! Soon, it’s time to explore it’s hidden cave systems.. :)

GIFs! GIFs everywhere! In this post, we  go berserk with the GIFs, and we start off with Vilya who has tried something new: step-by-step GIFs!

Typically Vilya also records videos of her progress with sprites and portraits (which can be seen on her blog), but this time she also tried her hands on making GIFs of the steps. Here’s the result, featuring a portrait and a rework of the Slime card:

Most of our time has been spent dealing with the upcoming Black Ferrets battle, though!

First up, the new boss portrait:

Then, a few GIFs with the battle itself, from our early test runs:

And finally, some of the sprite work Fred has been working on for this battle:

Excited for the battle? We are too, and hopefully the patch where you’ll be able to try it out won’t be too far away! Stay tuned for more next week :)

As you may already know, the festival patch is finally live, and if you haven’t checked it out already, you definitely should go do so in the Frontline Beta! :D

We also released the Original Soundtrack a few days ago, since a lot of you were asking for it! It currently contains 31 songs from Story Mode + 6 Arcade Mode Remixes, and will be updated as new songs get added to the game :)

Here’s the link to the OST on Steam!

Since a new patch often means new bugs, Teddy has been on bug hunting duty while Fred & Vilya moved on to do other things!

For Vilya, that meant doing a whole lot of different tasks, including creating a new portrait and a bunch of new hats:

Fred, meanwhile, has started animating some of the new enemies you’ll be facing in the next area: Mt.Bloom! As they’re still WIP at this stage, though, here’s a mix of some of the cleaned up animations from the flashback cutscene:

Right now, Teddy is busy prototyping the next boss fight, which we’ll hopefully be able to show some stuff from in next week’s recap! For now, here’s another sneak peek of who you’ll be facing:

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