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! :)