It’s a new week, and a new recap!

Last week ended up being spent both on the final Mount Bloom things as well as the next temple. Teddy started off the week prototyping the optional phase puzzle challenge(s), and while we were sending them around for in-house testing, we simultaneously worked ahead with designing the next upcoming enemy visuals and improving our old temple backgrounds.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – first, let’s take a look at said prototypes….

First up is a new type of puzzle mechanic, where you have to avoid getting hit by sparks by shooting yourself back and forth between two of those “donkey barrels”. This gets increasingly harder, starting with you just having to avoid tiny stationary sparks, but after a while there will be long lines of spark moving in the opposite direction of your barrels.

When we’re adding the real artwork for this (keep in mind all you see here is strictly WIP and/or placeholder), we want the sparks exchanged for fields of electricity instead, that can be short or long depending on the difficulty of the part of the challenge.

There will, of course, be regular puzzles as well – only much harder than the ones you encountered in the main story portion of the game! Figuring out where to go, how to get there and – perhaps most important of all – knowing exactly when to shoot yourself out of the barrels will be crucial in these puzzles!

Once we were satisfied with the prototypes, Vilya went ahead and started working on getting the actual background art in place:

Okay, but what about the temple stuff?! Well, as you may remember, a while ago Vilya was working on the first zone of the temple (which in fact is a time travel village, so we should probably stop calling it a temple). This week she continued this work, adding a bunch of details to the upper part of the map:

As for the enemies, here’s what the current lineup looks like:

As always, these are subject to change or redesign as we work ahead! For now though, there’s a cute little worm, a mysterious patch of moss (?!), an annoying monkey, and a statue on a rampage!

These guys will appear in the present state of the time travel village, where everything is abandoned, ruined and overgrown (kind of continuing on the whole Mount Bloom theme, but using a different approach). Provoked by the presence of the artifact, even the statues come to life to haunt you! Oh no!

But first, we gotta finish those Mount Bloom side quests….. So, see you next week! :D

Last week we uploaded the main quest of Mount Bloom to the Frontline beta, but as you know, we still have a way to go before the mountain is complete! So, this week we’ve mainly been focusing on the side quests and secrets that will appear in the caves.

We’re planning on adding four side quests/secrets to the mountain. Two of those will be regular quests, and two of them will be challenges or puzzles you’ll have to find on your own, so to speak. Once the rest of the game is complete, we’ll probably return to Mount Bloom (as well as all the other areas) and add more side stuff, but for now I think we all want to move along as quickly as possible and get more main story completed, right? Therefore, we’ll settle for four things for now, which should be enough to make the mountain feel alive for people running through the stable beta.

So, Teddy has been on prototyping duty. Spoiler spoiler, but there will be more Phase Shift puzzles as part of one of the secrets – and they’re gonna be a lot harder than the main story ones! These puzzles need to be thought out, prototyped using the game engine and then tried by us and our closest friends before we decide which ones we actually want to use – and which ones need to be edited, scrapped or made harder…

Vilya, meanwhile, has been working on some additional backgrounds which will lead you to the hidden puzzle(s):

We also figured that the Power Flower boss needed a boss portrait – it just seemed a little bit lame the way it appeared without any sort of introduction. So we went ahead and added one of those too:

Fred has also been working on some NPC animations for the side quests, but because they would more or less spoil the outcome of our quests, we decided against showing them. Instead, here’s a few more boss animations he’s been doing as well:

As you may or may not see, these animations aren’t done yet: when we make enemy sprites we always make “sketch”-animations for them to begin with, where some pixels may be missing or certain lines aren’t properly cleaned up. This way, if we end up scrapping an attack or want to change the way it looks when we prototype the actual fight, we won’t have wasted as much time. Only after it’s possible to play the entire boss with all animation sketches added and everything feels good, we let Fred continue on to polish & clean up the sketches.

Speaking of sketches, Fred also started working on one of the enemies you’ll meet in the time travel temple…. A monkey! Here’s a bunch of sketches he made while trying to come up with what the monkey should look like, as well as the final versions we decided upon:

The colors may yet change once they’re added to the game and we see what they look like against the background. But, that’s for another post! For now, it’s time for us to head back to side quest making.

See you soon!

If you checked our Forums or the Steam updates, you probably know this already, but if not: the main story part of Mount Bloom is now available on the Frontline beta!

This is an early update, so some vital things are still missing! For instance, most things in this area lack the proper sound effects (and a lot of ’em are completely silent as a result). We also haven’t added any side quests or secrets to the mountain – that’s what we’ll be working on the next 1-2 weeks or so. But it’s now possible to run through the part of the main story that will lead you up to the door of the next temple. Once we’ve thrown in a couple of side quests, added the proper sound effects and patched it all into stable, we’ll continue working on the actual temple!

For now though, it’d be awesome if you guys could run through the mountain and let us know of any silly bugs you come across!

Anyway, as you can guess, last week was all about getting this patch up and running. While Teddy furiously put everything together Vilya made the last few backgrounds. So here they are:

And now, we’ll go back to adding side quests and picking out sound effects! See you next week :D

Another week in which we continue to finishing up the Mt Bloom! Vilya continues to create backgrounds for the challenges:

(WIP here)

(WIP #1!)
(WIP #2!)

Plus a few more portraits! These should be the last vital portraits before the frontline update which will contain the main quest and challenges of the mountain. Once that’s all in place we’ll move on to adding a few side quests / activities, which means there might be one or two more later on (after the frontline update):

Meanwhile, Fred has been working on a bunch of effects & decorations, PLUS an upcoming boss…! It won’t be part of the coming update, but since Fred has finished his tasks for it he has started working on what’s coming next…

Our aim is to have the frontline patch ready by this weekend, unless something unforeseen (such as big scary bugs) happens, so let’s cross our fingers everything goes smoothly throughout the week!

This week we’ve continued our work with finishing up Mount Bloom and its challenges! Vilya has started working on the various challenge backgrounds needed for the Phase- and Poison Puzzles:

She also made a bunch of new puzzle blocks to go with it (a bit more advanced than the ones from last week):

As well as two additional portraits for the miner NPCs found in the mine:

We also had to expand on one of the Mount Bloom maps, to make room for the entrance to one of the challenges:

Meanwhile, Fred has focused on decorating the cave, adding tiny waterfalls, destructible mushrooms, and a ton of animated edges around every pool of water, among other things:

Next week will be pretty much the same, with Vilya focusing on more challenge backgrounds and Teddy implementing it all, all while Fred decorates the hell out of the area so it’ll look as awesome as possible! Stay tuned~ :)