Another week has come to pass, and with it the usual teasers of the work we’ve done!

Animation wise, Fred is churning on with cleaning up and adding flair to the dungeon. Below is a small buffet of some of the effects created this week!

At the same time, things are continuing to shape up in the Winterland. For the ice, we’ve added a reflection shader to give it a more interesting look! For those who enjoy the fishing minigame, this lake offers a chilly continuation of that little pastime :)

The inhabitants of said Winterland are also beginning to take shapes, and several have already gotten faces! Here’s the owner of the cupcake house, and also the competitive younger brother of a certain other connoisseur of sweets and pastries already in the game…

And here’s a couple who lives with their kids in a small cottage, unable to afford anything closer to the city after running into some bad fortune :(

Now, onto bigger topics:

Let’s talk about release dates

We’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding the release date lately. Most of you are simply wondering if we have an exact date, while others are very upset about us not having released the game yet. Both Facebook and our Greenlight page have been getting a fair share of these posts, and we’re beginning to feel it might’ve been a mistake to ever making an estimate in the first place!

Our stance on when we’ll release the game has ultimately been the old Blizzard saying “when it’s done“, but we’ve tried making some estimates as to when that might be. Turns out we’re better at making games than guessing release dates! Looking at most other games, this seems to come with the job…

Please rest assured that no-one wants to see this game released more than we do. Eating food other than this week’s bargains? Having money to attend trade shows like PAX and GDC? Long term financial stability? Heck, sign us up!

However, what’s more important to us than these things is releasing a product you’ll enjoy, and we’re proud of. What point is all this effort we’re putting in if the game isn’t what it should have been?

So, without further ado, we’re removing all estimates of when the game will be released! It’ll return to and stay “To Be Announced” until we’ve come to a point where we positively can give you a reliable time.

This doesn’t mean we’re planning to slack off or anything, but just that we understand the frustration some fans have felt regarding delays, and this is the only course of action guaranteed to prevent that from happening.

While the Winterland is a cold and harsh landscape, there’s quite nothing like snuggling up under a blanket in front of the fireplace inside one of the cozy buildings the area has to offer. Below are the insides of two of those, the Cupcake Store as well as something a bit more christmasy!

Jumping over to the temple, enemies won’t be the only dangers to worry about for the players. Puzzles and traps will be in full display, so watch your steps!

The past week the Winterland has kept on growing and it’s really starting to take shape! We mentioned interesting landmarks and whatnot in the last post, so here is one more of those!

We won’t go too deep about what juicy secrets are hiding inside this delicious structure, let’s just say that will get some fierce competition on the sweets market!

The last polish of the temple has also been going forward, getting closer and closer to completion. Here’s a few more cleaned up animations from some of the enemies:

This week, the Winterland has kept getting attention and kept growing. We have tried our best to make sure that there are lots of interesting landmarks and quests to be found through out the area, even more so then in the Halloween Forest. Without spoiling too much, here’s a screen of a somewhat recognizable sled!

Fred is still focusing on the first temple, this week mainly containing of cleaning up enemy animations.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally found an apartment  to set up base in. We’ll dig more into detail about it when the big moving date arrives, but in short it will make problem solving and fine tuning much easier as well as increasing our work pace!

Being more or less done with the backdrops and decorations for the temple, Vilya has gone into snowstorm overdrive to finalize the look of our winter region! We’re really pleased with both the look and the layout of the areas, and we’re confident that we can fill them with some pretty interesting content. Players will be able  to reach the winterland after completing the first dungeon.

Meanwhile, Fred is making some finishing touches on the dungeon polish by creating unique death animations for most of the enemies!

Next week will follow in the same snowy footprints, don’t forget your hats!

This week we have focused on adding those small details that tend to make an area feel more alive. Often it’s not the way you make the biggest or most important sprites that makes an area nice, it’s in how you decorate and add details. Here’s some examples of the improvements we made:

Here’s another example, where we did not only add decorations, but also changed the layout quite a bit:

In this room we planned to block the way up the stairs to a key until you solve a puzzle using the machine to the right. However, as we thought about it we realized it would probably be cooler if solving the puzzle itself was enough to unlock the door. Therefore we made the room smaller before redecorating it to look a bit more interesting.

Lastle, here’s an animated gif of what the walls will look like in the game:

We’re really excited about how the dungeon is coming together, and we hope you guys will like it as well.

As we’re writing this we’re also well on our way of refining a specific part of the dungeon where we plan on recording that video we talked about in the previous post. Hopefully we’ll be able to include it in one of the coming recaps!

This week, things have been moving forward at a steady pace. Vilya has continued working away with putting together the dungeon interior as well as wiping together some more card art. Below is the cards for the Brawler bot and the Wisp, both enemies of our first dungeon.

Fred is back in the groove after fighting off school work for the last couple of weeks, working away at some heavy boss creating for the dungeon! We’ll probably keep all of the boss details on the down under to give you guys something to look forward and fantasize about, but we promise it will be big, mean and contain a lot of heavy weaponry.

So for the coming few weeks, the updates might be a bit less meaty since both Fred and Teddy will be hammering away at the super secret boss in joined forces. We will try to make it up to you by dishing out a new video (content unknown for now) in the near future, so stay alert!

Every monster needs its card, and minibosses or bosses are no exception! Here are the cards for Phaseman and Giga Slime:

As you can see, they have slightly more extravagant frames than regular cards, and we plan to make their effects a bit more awesome than most normal cards (although not ridiculously overpowered like the RO boss cards). Now you’re all probably thinking “but wait, what if I defeat the boss and don’t get a card? :(”

In order to let the completionists be completionists, we’re adding a Memory Room to the Collector’s HQ!

As you start out, the Memory Room is just a long corridor of empty pedestals, but for every miniboss or boss you defeat, a miniature trophy of it will appear on one of these pedestals. If you ever want to fight that battle again, either for the heck of it or because you want to get the card, you can activate the trophy and relive the battle!

Hopefully, by the time the game is done, there will be a ton of those pedestals to fill!

This week we’re jumping back into the flying dungeon!

We have planned ahead for what to do next, and Vilya started off making a bunch of drops that you’ll find as you slay your way through the area.

All of the items are either equipable, edible or build into something that is. Exactly what they are and what they’re used for is something you’ll have to find out for yourself, though! Can you guess already?

There’s also a hat:

Next week will be spent making cards and the very last few rooms of the dungeon. Hopefully by then Fred has done away with his remaining schoolwork so we’ll see some more animations too! Perhaps we’ll even start on the dungeon boss…

After gaining weight and laziness over the duration of our little break, it’s finally time to start getting back to work.

Vilya’s still trying to keep the spirit of christmas alive by making sprites for our winter area:

There’s christmas trees, snowmen, and lots and lots of snow, as you can see! Of course, no area is complete without hats, so it’s time we started making a few of those as well:

Another piece of development news, which will be very exciting to some, and not-so-exciting to others, is that we’re working on some translation tools! We’ve gotten quite a few offers to have fansub groups translate our game to various languages, and if there are fans out there who want to bring the game to their non-English speaking countrymen, why not let them?

Basically, it’s a set of tools that can be used by anyone to change dialogue (and other texts). You have access to everything you need, like coloring parts of the text, or adding conditional phrases (like having a character say different things depending on character gender, or how many is in your party). By saving it into the game’s language folder, you can then select it in game.

Our hopes are that the tools will be used to make better translations than we’d be able to get even if we hired someone to help us! In their final version, the goal is to have good support for collaboration, with options to merge different language files and keep the best translated lines.

Also, having an approach like this can let players choose between, say, a literal translation by one group and an idiomatic translation by another. Perhaps a fan with a great knack of dialogue writing will even release an improved English version!

What happened to the dungeon? Fear not, it hasn’t been forgotten! We’ll most likely get back to it in the coming week, after discussing how to proceed :)