It’s time for the Weekly Recap! Wohoo! For those that didn’t know, a new Frontline patch went live last week, which obviously has kept us busy for a while. This one features a bunch of side quests!

If you want to know how many to look for: there are two new rooms with challenges which aren’t triggered by quests – you can do them by simply walking into them and uh… solving what appears before you.

There are also three quests triggered by characters in the cave. As always, we try to be pretty creative with our quests – I think you know by now that there aren’t exactly too many simple fetch quests (though one or two of these might have elements similar to that).

It’s also possible to get the proper achievement (and reward) for catching all Mount Bloom fishes (a proper Angler Fish hat):

And as always, a bunch of new expressions were made for our silly cast (but what is Belmont doing among them?!)

But we haven’t only been working on the patch (or on finding and fixing the bugs that you guys helped us discover after the patch went live), we’ve also worked on Tai Ming. Vilya continues to destroy the first map:

And Fred has spent some time on the annoying monkeys you’ll face up against in the present version of the town (they are still WIP, so beware of stray pixels and missing tails)!

Another week has gone by and we’re continuing work on the upcoming Time Travel temple! Teddy is back in town as well, so there should be a patch up and running before the end of the week, featuring the side quests of Mount Bloom!

Anyway, back in the office Vilya has continued working on the ruining the area around the Barracks, which have seen some neglect over the years as you time travel back and forth:

A while ago we also started working on the second Tai Ming Zone, which will be the actual village part of the area/temple-thingy! For this one, we really want the player to think a bit more. This place is more about exploration and figuring out how to solve the quests than going from point a to point b and doing something mechanically. Instead, the entire map becomes your puzzle, where you have to change certain things in the past to unlock a way forward in the present.

Of course, when in the present we’ve thrown in a bunch of encounters and places where you’ll have regular battles as well. After all, this is still supposed to be somewhat temple-y, and the enemies do drop cards..!

In the end, this is what our little layout ended up like! Below is the Past version, where everyone’s still in town, living their everyday life:

And here’s the present version, where things are in ruin, overgrown and forgotten (with roaming enemies!):

Now, this is just an early sketch so things may still change (such as distances, house sizes etc). And obviously the houses and stuff won’t look like they do here, they are all placeholder until the actual graphic for them has been made!

Oh, and speaking of enemies by the way, here’s a couple more animations for one of those you’ll encounter in this area, made by Fred this week:

And finally, a portrait (cause why not):

This week we’ve moved on to working on the time travel temple until Teddy is home and ready to patch the Mount Bloom sidequests into the game!

First up though, something important we forgot in the mountain: fishing opportunities! Of course you’ll be able to fish in the mountain as well, so there had to be some fishes created:

So the top one is the Anglerfish, hidden deep beneath the waves where it eats unsuspecting smaller fishes, such as the Wimp! Like some of the rare fishes, it has two icons, which allows us to use a larger one when the character holds it above his/her head, and a smaller one that fits inside the inventory circle.

The blue one is actually not made for Mount Bloom. Instead, we’re swapping the Rock Fish from pillar mountains for this one (which is supposed to be a Salmon, btw). The Rock fishie will instead be moved into Mount Bloom, where we feel it fits a bit better.

The purple one is a little crystal fish, and the gold one… a gold fish!

Then we have the slimy Mossfish, and a message in a bottle! Which may or may not contain a side quest…. ;)

As Vilya moved back to the temple, she decided to upgrade the old Grindea statue and make another version of it, featuring a sword, for the ancient village:

These new statues will at some point be replacing the old Grindea statues scattered across the land, for now though we continue to focus on Tai Ming (the time travel village)!

Vilya actually started transforming the past version of the first village map (which she created long ago) into its present, ruined version! Here’s the first step:

There’s still a long way to go, but it’s a start! Here’s a list of some of the things still to be added/changed:

* Tone down the colors of the house a bit – paint tend to fade, after all
* Destroy one of more of the pillars
* Add more vines to the building
* Ruin the roof & create a hole from one of the windows
* Add moss to everything!
* Destroy & add moss to the statue
* Bigger bushes & plants here and there
* Add more rocks that have fallen from the walls/cave roof (if there’s one?!)
* Make the containers (barrels & crates) overgrown & broken

…..and the list goes on! As you can see, this will be quite a project, so there will be quite a few videos like this of the transformation. Hope you like it!

And to end this post, after being in Germany for a week, Fred is back in the office and ready to pump out a bunch of new animations! Two of them can be seen here:

See you next week!

A new week, in which we continue to work on the Mount Bloom side quests!

There are new doors, leading deeper into the caves, where two very different challenges appear…

The first one, as you know, is the Phase Puzzle challenge. Last week we decided to change the graphics of the Spark puzzle a bit, having the barrels move on rails instead of floating in the air (to make it less abstract and easier to spot when the rails are covered in electricity that will throw you out of the barrel):

The second challenge will involve this new crystal type:

(The crystals will be randomly generated by the game engine, so it only looks as if it’s the same one in this Photoshop screenshot. Also, the lower walls will appear above everything in the game, so ignore any overlaps you spot!)

In this challenge you have to get past a large number of these heavier crystals, which don’t easily break when you hit them. In fact, it takes a long long time to get them out of the way – and it’s time you don’t have. You see, the corridor where you’ll find these heavier crystals is filled with poisonous gas! How will you ever get through to the other side?!

This Caveling, called Chix, is a new character which has a very important quest for you:

You see, it seems he has lost his pet inside the cave system, and he really wants his dear old pal to find its way back to him. Can you help him find it?

Of course, you can’t have side quests and challenges without proper rewards. One of which (spoiler alert) will be a gas mask! Since Vilya has a tradition of uploading videos featuring 4 hats, she threw together 3 more which we don’t know exactly where they will appear yet:

(In the end, we decided to go for dark eyes for the gas mask, so after the video was finished we changed it into this:)

While we’re close to finishing up these side quests (we only have very minor things left), unfortunately Teddy is leaving for Stockholm in a few days, which means he’ll be unable to patch until he gets back home (his laptop messes up the game font when compiling). However, he’ll still work from there, so while we’re not hitting upload on this patch just yet, we’ll continue to work on the next temple until he’s back and ready to patch from a safe computer :)