First of all, thank you all for your comments on last week’s blog post, where we asked about how to make it easier to understand the gold points! It seems like you guys are more or less as divided as we are, so we’ll keep thinking about that for a while longer.. :)

Now, on to this week’s post!

Last week we made an interesting decision! Many have asked us for a way to buy back items sold by mistake, and we’ve thought about how and where to add it. We figured, in the end, that we’d turn the shady merchant of Evergrind City into a “buy back” feature, rather than an accessory shop, and let the actual Accessory Shop have its own building, like the rest of the shops! As such, Vilya got to work to create the assets needed.

First up, we needed to decide on the perfect location. And which would be better than the closed off house next to the Blacksmith:

Next up, the building needed a sign, to fit in with the rest of shops! Here’s Vilya’s step-by-step of making it, as well as what it looks like on top of the building:

Now that we have the exterior, we need to create the interior as well, where you’ll actually buy stuff:

Finally, no shop is complete without it’s shopkeeper, right? And here she is:

Now, there are no animations from Fred this week, and that’s because in order to speed things up, he’s making placeholder animations rather than rendering them all to completion one by one. This way, he can make many more sketches & half-finished animations to give to Teddy, who in turn can start working on the cutscene using these placeholders instead of having to wait until every single animation is done! Afterwards, Fred can clean them up and Teddy will just replace the image source!

Pretty nifty, if you ask me. Of course, it also means no animations to show here for a while, as posting half-finished things has had a tendency to confuse people who believe it’s actually the finished thing. Hang in there for now!

Another week has gone past, and while Teddy is still working on the translation tool, he’s been making huge progress! A lot of his time recently has been spent implementing support for languages with different characters, specifically the Asian ones, as the fonts used for those need to be quite a bit bigger than latin alphabet ones.

As a result though, we can now play around with Google translated Japanese in the game:

Most likely everything written there is completely wrong, but hey, we’re no translators!

As we mentioned before, once this tool is done you’ll be able to browse translations through the game client. In order for that to work we need an interface, right? Here’s a mockup Vilya threw together:

Basically, the red squares are placeholders for the icons used by the translation.

The white boxes to the right of the squares are where the translation’s title will be displayed, and the “Subscribed” text will only appear on translations you’ve subscribed to (duh), which means they’ll be added next to your English (Default) selection in the game’s Options.

Beneath the icons are green and red arrows. These indicate how many upvotes vs downvotes each translation has gotten.

The speech bubble-icon will indicate what percentage of the dialogue has been translated, while the cogwheel next to it will tell you the completion percentage of system texts (interface/menu stuff mostly). We figured we’d separate these as many feel that the dialogues are more important than interface stuff, and having a single % would be misleading in cases where 100% of the dialogue has been translated but 0% of the interface, bringing the overall completion unfairly low.

Since we realize these icons may be a bit unclear on their own, we’ll add a description beneath the content box, explaining what the icons mean.

Finally, you’ll be able to use search box to filter the translations based on your language, and it’ll suggest languages based on what you’ve written already!

———————————————-

Next up, we’re thinking about how to make the use of Gold Skill Points more obvious. A lot of people seem to get a bit confused once they get their first Gold Point, unless they powerleveled a single skill the entire time, leaving them unable to do anything but use the skill point. If you’ve leveled multiple skills though, you’ll end up with a Gold Point you cannot use yet, and there’s no indicator in the menu for what the Gold Points are actually for. So, we’re looking for a way to make that more clear!

Here are some of our options:

Option #1: Keeping it as it is. Yes, this is an option as well. You get a gold point, but there’s no way of telling what it’s for until you’ve leveled a spell enough times to unlock its use – in the meanwhile you just have to keep guessing, or forget about it.

Visually, it’s probably the best looking option.

Option #2: Added silver and gold points to the leveling bar for clarity. This should make it clear that you can use gold points to level skills, but it could still confuse players: they get a gold point, and see that it can be used to level their skills, yet somehow they can’t use it yet?

We worry that with this option, players will believe that they can use silver and gold points to level skills simultaneously, and in the worst case scenario, believe it’s a bug or get frustrated when they can’t use them.

Option #3: Graying out and putting a lock on the gold part of the skill bar. Our hope with this option would be that people will understand that they can use gold points to level skills, but that they’re locked for now. Once you’ve put your 5 silver points in a skill, an animation + sound effect will play which unlocks the next 5 points (making the skill bar look like the one in Option #2, as illustrated under the second skill above).

Probably the most informative option – if people understand the visual cues – but also possibly the least visually pleasing.

Option #4: Basically a slightly less cluttered version of Option #3, where the grayed out portion of the bar will disappear, and the blue crystal will turn yellow once you start using gold points (as illustrated under the second skill above).

Which one do you prefer? Let us know in the comments!

———————————-

To end this post, we have some regular art stuff as well. Vilya has continued working on both backgrounds and characters:

And Fred continues to create dragon animations:

See you next week! :D

We’re still a long way to go before everything is ready for this epic cutscene, but Fred is working as fast as he can! Here’s another animation, featuring the dragon as it wakes up (gasp!):

While Fred is busy animating stuff for the flashback cutscene with Charlotte and the dragon, Teddy has jumped into creating a new and improved version of the translation tool, that will work with Steam workshop! This means you awesome translators out there no longer have to go through the hassle of zipping and uploading stuff to the forums every time there’s a tiny update.

Also, once the tool is finished, we’ll implement a way to browse translations directly through the game, so this should make things a lot easier for those wanting to use the translations as well.

As for Vilya, she actually went away on a riding camp last week, but she was kind enough to prepare a bunch of portraits for this post, which were also posted on her blog while she was gone:

The first are variations of the Evergrind Arena receptionist, which will appear in other areas where it makes sense to have a front desk manager (though they will probably be regular NPCs and not host a set of challenges like the original receptionist)!

Second row is a bunch of people from the time travel area, and the last one (with text box added for effect) is the portrait of a mini-boss that will appear later on!

We pushed out another update for the Frontline beta earlier during the week. It mostly contains minor changes and bugfixes, but also the long awaited Weapon & Shield style slots! You can read up about the changes more thoroughly over here.

While Teddy has put most of his efforts into the update, Vilya and Fred have been busy working on assets for the cutscene we talked about last week. We mentioned that the players mother Charlotte would make her first appearance in it, which means she needed a proper face!

Something that sets Charlotte apart from other NPC’s is that she’ll take on the same color palette as your own character. Vilya put together a ton of different hair and skin colors so we can mix and match it as we please!

Fred managed to finish up the spriting stage and dove head first into the animations for the scene.