This week we’ve continued to push ahead! Right now we’re working on an odd factory in the midst of the snowy fields we’ve been talking about recently. Here’s what the exterior looks like right now:

The Christmas Present, an enemy we’ve shown a while back, will be one of the many challenges lurking around within the Factory. Instead of normal projectiles, we’ve gone with a more explosive approach!

Aside from building the factory exterior, Vilya has also kept on remaking portraits. Here’s the latest batch of those, all inhabitants of the winter area:

With the latest Frontline update, the story is slowly but steadily starting to take a more central role. With that, some of the more important characters have been in need of some touch ups. Just like Marino, your friendly neighbor Luke has received a graphical update:

(Now, we know there are many more sprites that could use some touch-ups as well, but for now we’re only going to focus on characters that play some part in the main story. We want to keep pushing ahead, after all, and remaking too much would quickly turn into a time sink of black hole-ish proportions where we get better at drawing and remake graphics in a never-ending circle. Therefore we’ll try to save most touch-ups for the post-production, so bear with us until then!)

This week, we’ve managed to push out a new content update for the Frontline beta. The main focus of the update is the new Marino Encounter, as well as some new cut scenes setting up where the story is heading next.

The update is not massive in size but we are still very much interested in hearing feedback from you guys who are in the beta, especially about the Marino fight. Was it too hard, too easy, any suggestions how to make it more interesting?

The in house testing has been a bit all over the place ranging from it being “impossible” to “I’ve played this game so much I don’t even know if it’s hard”. We’ve set up a thread over at the forums where you can post any suggestions and thoughts you have about the fight, it would really help us a ton!

With this update out of the way, we are already hard at work with the next one. Below are the sprites for the rest of the Season Fae Elders, which all will play a crucial role during your visit in the Winterland!

The cutscenes have stayed in focus this week (to Teddys delight!) so Fred spent some quality time with the Master of the Collectors Headquarters which we showed last week, making her fit to enter the big stage!

Speaking of stage, of course the master has her own room in the HQ. What it looks like? We’re glad you asked! Here’s the place where you’ll find her:

She certainly has interesting taste in interior design..!

Other than creating this room, Vilya has also been making some new portraits. These guys are a bunch of Collector Scientists, working in the HQ:

On a whole different note, both Fred and Vilya just handed in their final school assignment for this semester. Thanks to all of you who’ve supported us by pre-ordering the game, they won’t have to continue their studies for at least another year! This not only means a whole lot of less stress in their life but it also means all of us will be able to focus whole heartedly on the game for now, which in short feels amazing. 

A big bunch of love to all of you who’ve made this possible!

Last week, we all went back to school, but luckily not as students! Wednesday to Friday we attended the Gotland Game Conference as judges tasked with providing feedback to the student projects.

Here’s a showreel of the games:

There were lots of fun games present, and we truly had a blast playing them all! Hopefully our feedback was useful for the students as well.

Some of our favorites include Crocodile Chow-Down, which was an arcade game featuring a large crocodile head where you had to align different types of teeth in patterns provided on screen and then close the lid to “chew the food down” and increase your score. It looks pretty fun in the trailer, but actually playing it was a very nice experience! The game won the Pwnage Award (Best of Show) so apparently we weren’t the only ones in love with it!

Another game that we really liked was Defunct, a “racing” game where you zoomed through large landscapes in search for your long lost father! …to be honest, we don’t really know why you’re zooming through them, but whatever the reason the game had an awesome sense of speed and was a blast to play. Here’s a gameplay trailer:

Playing other people’s games isn’t the only thing we’ve done, although it honestly took up quite a bit of our time! Despite twisting his ankle really badly, Fred managed to churn out some cutscene animations, and Vilya made a couple of portraits! Among them the portrait for the friendly and definitely-not-shady leader of the Collectors:

And a remake of Wedge: