Alright! New week, and with my work on the ghost ship mostly done for now, it’s time to start looking back on those improvement ideas I was working on a little while ago!

Starting with the Pillar Mountains portion, here’s a bunch of the new props that will decorate the town area:

With more to come – I already have a bunch of new ideas for stuff to add here aside from these items, but I think I’ll continue on with the sketches I’ve already made for now, meaning Pillar Mountains is next!

So, moving on to the Pillar Mountains improvements, we’ll start off with a couple of random things to give the area a bit more personality; some poles and a railing of some sort (gotta keep the kids from falling off the mountain now don’t we):

I’m also gonna make a bunch of other plants and stuff to make the area seem a little bit more lush as well, starting off with this one:

Some more greenery to spice up these backgrounds:

As well as another one of those poles, this one facing the other direction:

I also feel like we could use some bigger variance between the trees so I decided to make another birch, this one a bit smaller than the one we use already:

And here’s where we’re at after having added a bunch of more stuff:

I think Pillar Mountains will definitely look a bit more interesting after this, especially with a bunch of more things added which we’ll look at later on…

For now though, it’s time to return to the Ghost Ship! With Teddy and Fred having started work on the third floor, things become more and more clear and one of the things we wanted to change slightly is the background of the corridor leading to the huts, making it bigger, so here goes:

A bit more space in there! I think I’ll have to add some more random boxes and stuff around the room to keep it from feeling too empty, but one step at a time right :)

And of course, Fred having started work on the third floor means more ghosts! Here’s a bunch of the spirits you’ll meet on your adventures through the ship:

New week, and it’s time to finish up the third floor (my part of it, anyway)! With the hub room finished, the third floor backgrounds are more or less completed, and all that remains now is to add those fancy border decorations:

…and apply the floor masks to make sure the effects all go in their proper places:

Now that the interior of the ship is mostly done, it’s time to start focusing on finishing up the exterior, where the last boss of this dungeon will take place. Looking back at the shape of the ship, I felt a bit displeased with the way it looked and so decided to improve on it a bit, starting with the front:

Slightly better, no? I’ll adjust the back a little bit as well I think, but after that the exterior should be more and less done as well – until we start testing out the boss battle and no doubt need to adjust certain things, at least!

Continuing on then, the back of the ship needed a slight upgrade as well shape wise, so here goes:

In the interior, a while ago we decided to change the direction in which you travel through the eastern part of the ship’s third floor, resulting in that I had to change which of the rooms contained the rope ladder and which contained the jumpdown:

We’ve also had quite a few discussions regarding what we want to happen on the ship’s third floors, and a lot of our talks have revolved around whether or not we’d like to include friendly ghosts on the ship. Early on we wanted to avoid this, but as time went on we became more and more enthusiastic about the idea of having some friendly ghosts to chat to that could also give you quests; so we decided to go for it. As such, the final part of the ship will involve some traditional questing where you need to bring some ghosts back to their senses in order to get to the final part of the ship. Of course, once this is done you’ll also be able to do other quests with ghosts on the ship, making it a semi bustling place of its own (hopefully). Don’t worry though, we won’t go overboard (ha) – we’ll try to keep the amount of NPCs on the ships to a decent amount (and not Tai Ming style 60+) :)

With this addition, we actually feel a lot more excited about the ship as a whole, so hopefully it’ll be something you guys enjoy as well!

And speaking of which, here’s a bunch of Fred’s tests for the ghost NPCs which he starting working on pretty much as soon as we decided this is the route we want to take (did I mention we are quite excited about this addition?):

The first completed ghost is the spirit of a pianist who once played at the grand soirées of the hub room, but now has forgotten who he is and floats around the ship looking for clues that will return his memories… How sad! Will you be able to help him?

This week it’s time for some more trap prototyping! This time we’ve been working on those eyes we’re using in the ‘ghost bridge’ room, but here they serve as a ‘trap’ of sort in an ordinary fighting room.

In our first iteration, we used the eye in the same way we use it in the ghost bridge room; basically moving back and forth in a set speed. If you’re in the regular world, the beam from its eye will be slightly transparent and won’t deal damage, while in the ghost world it’s darker and will damage you quite a bit if you get hit by it.

For the second iteration, we wanted the eye to feel more ‘alive’, so we’ve given it a couple patterns. Either it will slowly open its eye and cast a beam straight forward, or it’ll look to the sides as in the example above for a little bit before closing up again. These patterns are then randomized so you never know which one it will do next; you’ll have to keep track of it to know how to dodge it.

We do prefer the second version so far, as it makes the eye feel more like a living thing rather than something that just ‘blindly’ (ha) looks back and forth forever. It also keeps the players on their toes a bit since they need to keep track of what it will do next, rather than just dodge the eye beam over and over.

And now, time for something much less exciting but still very needed… Some background masking! This is a technique we use when we want certain effects and such to only be visible on the floor and nowhere else. Basically, each part of the floor is painted with a color (in this case a pretty pink), which will be used as a guide in the game for where the effect can appear.

Starting out by applying this to the first floor rooms, since we want to finish up the first floor and get it all sorted out before we move on to the other floors:

Next up, the captain’s portrait! To make sure I’m getting his features right, I’m going to trace the boss sprite for this one, using it as a base for the portrait:

And here’s the finished thing:

As I mentioned before, we’re currently working on finishing up the first floor. That means going over each room and adding the remaining details that have been missing. For the very first room, that entails adding a ton of boxes and crates to give the room a bit more ‘storage room’-y feeling:

Quite a few boxes! We thought of blocking the path leading straight to the door, but ended up keeping it open as we felt like forcing the player to take the long way around might feel a bit overdesigned.

Meanwhile in the animation department, the enemies are finally being polished into their final forms, their animations cleaned up with further details added. Just look at this:

Time to go over the rooms one more time and make a bunch of fixes! First up, making the room we made most recently slightly smaller, just to give it a feeling of being more crowded:

Secondly, roughing up the edges of the water part of the first boss battle room, so it doesn’t look as purposefully made:

Next, because of the mechanic allowing the player to fall down from ghost bridges in this room, I had to change the side of the hole slightly to make sure the player can’t fall down into it:

Also remade part of this background so that as the bookcase slides to the left to reveal the door upon completing the puzzle hidden inside, the floor shows the path accordingly:

And finally, added some numbers to the cabin room entrances, just to give it the feel of actually being cabins:

Now, after talking about it some more, we actually decided to make the small map room even smaller, and by quite a lot:

I made a painting of the ghost ship in its regular as well as its ‘spirit world’ version:

And also made a portrait that will be used later on in the captain’s room, featuring the captain himself. This time I started with the spirit world version, and went on to make make the regular world/human version:

And next, something small from the port town of Port Monnaie, adding a path to the left side entrance to the mayor’s house. At first we tried with a carpet, but we ended up going with the path since we thought it just looked a little bit better in the end:

Next up, it’s time to add some of those decorations Fred were playing around with to the rooms! I’ll start by adding them to the first floor to begin with, since we want to get that floor as completed as possible before moving on. Our hope is to be able to play through the first floor in its proper form asap, so we finally can get a real feeling for what everything’s supposed to be like before moving on.

So, here goes:

I definitely feel these decoration help with giving the ship a more… ship-y feel? And also makes quite a big difference in the detail level of each room as well. What do you guys think?

Now, finally it’s time to get up close and personal with the final enemy in the ghost ship: the crabs! They’ve been ‘finished’ for quite a while, but after we tested them Teddy removed the prototype room so I couldn’t record any gifs showing ’em off!

Now though, let’s take a look at these beasts:

Our inspiration for these guys were pretty much the boars, straight up. Just a semi-tanky enemy that can rush in and annoy you while you’re minding your own business. They also have some regular attacks, but if you stay too far away from them, chances are higher they will run in to mess you up, as seen above.

Upon defeating them, they will fall onto their back and disappear in the usual puff of smoke!

Unlike the other enemies in the ghost ship, the crabs are the only ones that work the same regardless of whether you’re in the ghost world or regular world. So, where the ghosts might become invulnerable or invisible in the regular world and gain increasingly powerful attacks in the ghost world, these guys will continue on as usual.

Meanwhile, Fred’s been busy making all kinds of creepy animations for the ship, taking the props I made and making them even more creepy by having them move (or making completely new and creepy animation we’ll stick here and there across the ship):

Which one’s your favorite? I think mine’s the first, featuring the lovely bag!

Remember this room from last week= One of the doors that lead out of this room will be hidden until you complete the puzzle, so to hide it and give the room a bit more character I’ve been making a couple of shelves and decorations for them!

Once you complete the puzzle, the shelf on the right will slide across the floor and reveal the door behind it!

The next step is of course to ghostify the world, something we’ve been doing for a lot of rooms by now, so the process is pretty straight forward:

Next up, there’s the room that’s waiting inside the one we just finished. This is a room with some maps and notes, and also a key that will lead you to the next floor!

And the next step – of course! More ghostifying! This spirit world version is much like the other spirit world version rooms across the ship, bringing in the snake, spiders and bones:

Another thing we’ve been working on lately is a special encounter / mini boss type of deal featuring…. a fridge! Previously, we talked about the kitchen area of the ship being a bullet hell challenge, but seeing as the boss already uses a lot of bullet hell mechanics we thought we’d spice things up a bit by doing something slightly different.

So what you see below is a prototype of this battle, using the good old living puzzle block as a base (when it’s finished it’ll be an actual fridge, rest assured):

So basically, the idea here is that it jumps around in the kitchen, where some fires spring up from vents in the floor (a normal feature for every decent kitchen, right?) and your goal is to make it land on the fire as it appears, so the flames will damage it. In this first prototype, we used shockwaves as the thing that damages the player, but since it’s a fridge, what we want from it is something closer to this:

Ice attacks! We’re already quite satisfied with this encounter as it is right now, so all we gotta do now is give it some proper graphics.

This week we’ll start off with ghostifying that room from before! Adding some tentacles, bones, spiders and other creepy stuff, let’s go, you know the drill by now:

And now, time for a bunch of details to be added here and there, things we’ve forgotten or decided to add. First up, a big hole in the mess hall, separating the room into two parts:

Second, a stairway leading upward from the room we finished yesterday (not super happy about how it looks right now so might come back to it later):

And thirdly, making the first room slightly bigger, as we discussed a while back. I’ll probably come back to this room as well at a later point and add more boxes and decorations, seeings as you won’t be fighting in this room:

Fred’s been working on a bunch of things, and one of those are the obstacles you’ll face throughout the dungeon. A while back ago we showed a prototype of eyes that open and blast you to death if you’re still in the ghost world when they look at you, and some graphic tests for that has been made:

He’s also been working on some prototypes for the flying masks that will deal damage to you in the ghost world (although we haven’t exactly decided 100% if they should be masks in the end, it’s nice to be able to have some actual graphics for it temporarily compared to the very temporary art made my Teddy):

We’ve also decided to spice things up a bit in terms of the overall decorations of the ship, making it feel a bit more like a ship (hopefully) compared to other areas. So we’ve made some borders, rounding out the entrances/exits between rooms, and we’ll continue playing around with further wall decorations as seen in the examples below:

Next up we have another room! Still a few left before the ghost ship is completed, but not that many. This room is part of the first floor and contains a puzzle that can only be solved after you get hold of the skill that allows you to pass into the spirit world:

Finally, here’s another bunch of stuff Fred’s been working on! Skulls, jumping bones and what have you, all coming together nicely for the boss fight:

New week, and time to finish up the Mess hall by turning its regular version into a spirit world version!

As always, this involves changing the colors around a bit on the moss and such, but for this room it also involves a couple new props, including turning a couple of carrots into a sad and shrunken version of themselves as well as killing a flower in a vase:

Here’s the full WIP:

And the finished thing:

The boss fight prototyping continues, and we’ve made a bunch of changes and additions! First of all, the actual background has been added, which gives the fight a slightly more serious feel, but we’ve also added the proper graphics for some attacks such as the water ball thing:

And we’ve also edited on of his skills slightly, namely the skulls he summons:

Previously these skulls were only visible in the spirit world, which meant you had to swap back into the regular world to avoid them. Now though, we’ve made sure some of the skulls are in the regular world as well, making avoiding them slightly harder!

We still want to improve this fight slightly, but now it’s more about patterns more than anything – we’re kind of happy with what he does, just not the timings for when and in what order. In this version of the prototype seen above, he tends to randomly summon things for you to avoid, but we have since then made him go into various phases instead, meaning he’ll have a period of simply attacking followed by a period of summoning things for you to avoid. The second part will then feature both the bullet hell elements as well as dodging his regular attacks at the same time .

I think we’re really making progress with this and hopefully the finalized boss fight will be done soon – it definitely feels a lot closer to it now, anyway!

Next, it’s time to go back to drawing those disgusting bridges! In the mess hall there needs to be a ton of them, so I better get a move on and make a bunch of variations for them. Here goes:

And here are the finished things:

Next on our prototyping spree, we have another of the challenge rooms in the rather strange version of Startington! In this room, you’ll be facing obsession, and it takes the shape of you killing a whole lot of slimes, which then turn into… yourself?! What could it all mean?

Obviously this segment still needs a lot of work, but we’re getting there, and I think what we do in this part of the game is pretty cool even if it might not be super clear to everyone. Next up we’ll deal with the final(?) challenge, concerning ‘deceit’…

We’ll end this week with a look at a new room, though! This room is the final room of the second floor, so once this is done the whole 2nd floor can be put into the game, yay!

As you can tell, I’ve yet to make a painting to go inside the frame, but I’m kind of thinking I’ll make a painting of the ship itself. What do you guys think?

Time for the second part of the Mess hall, making all of those tables! I’ll be using a bunch of old tables as a base and make them look a bit worse for wear and edit the colors around a bit. In the end, they will be decorated with stuff and ghosts will be dining by them on chairs as well, but one step at a time!

The room where it’s at now:

So, as you know we’ve been talking quite a bit about a strange and creepy version of Startington that you’ll visit during your stay in the ghost ship. This place will feature strange visions of things that have happened or things related to the game in a set challenges with a keyword each.

The first one we’ve prototyped is for ‘expectations’, and will deal with the expectations you put on yourself and that other might have on you, and it takes the shape of a rather strange perfect guard challenge hosted by your dad!

Here’s a first sneak peek:

Kind of strange, huh? Well, it will get even stranger, believe us! This is just the first step of the journey…

Second part of the mess hall! In this part we’ll be decorating the place, adding some plates and whatnot to give the room a feel of actually being a place where people might come to eat.

First though, gotta make this uhm.. trolley thing? That you’ll need to push around a bit to get to the other end of the room:

And now, all about decorating:

We still need to keep the tables somewhat empty so you can move around on them easily on your way to the kitchen, so we haven’t gone too overboard with the decorations. Right now it’s kind of hard to tell that they’re floating as well, but that will be solved with shadows on the floor once they’re in the game. Here’s what it looks like for now though:

Next room we’ll focus on is the boss room! We want to make this room quickly to test out the boss battle in its actual setting, so I had to take a break from the other stuff to start working on it instead. Since we had a basic prototype up and running I already know approximately where everything should be in terms of distances and colliders, so all I gotta do is make sure I follow the sketch version:

Finished room:

And now, time to make the spirit world version of the boss room! Again pretty straight forward stuff, just gotta transform the place into a more spooky version of itself:

Finished version for now, ready to be implemented and tested with the boss battle:

Time to start working on those colors! This is gonna take a while since the ship is super huge, so I’ll split it in two parts (or however many are needed). In the first part we’ll be dealing with the basic colors, getting them down somewhat in any case. Might change them around later but it’s good to start with a base:

Obviously it’s gonna get a lot more detailed than this, and the water will be animated as well. We’re also considering changing the size of the upper front and back of the boat, making them bigger since they look kind of small right now. Oh well, onwards we go!

Time to take a look at what’s happening with the skeletons and discuss a piece of their design!

So one thing we’ve been wanting to do with our skeleton enemies is to give them a quirk where their head will fall off and become an enemy of its own, sort of like the Jumpkin from Pumpkin Woods; a pretty easy enemy that you just whack over a couple of time to get rid of, but that serves as an interesting game play element.

Because of this, Fred has started working on the skulls and what they’ll look like when they fall off and are brought to life on their own, and as he did so, we realized the square shape they currently have isn’t exactly ideal for what we want to do; it’s maybe a bit blocky and simple:

So to remedy this, we’ve now made a different, more regular looking skull, that we feel fit better:

While we do love the idea of the square head, it being a bit more original and all, we think this looks better overall. How do you guys feel?

So these last bunch of days we’ve been playing around with a bunch of new puzzle ideas for the ghost ship – we really want to mix things up and get some interesting use out of these mechanics. So, first thing we’ve tried is using the spirit world mechanic to make a burning ghost light candles for you.

Here’s a GIF showing our super early prototype:

Basically, the ghost ignores you while you’re in the regular world, and will start chasing you once you enter the spirit world, so your goal is to position yourself so that the ghost will pass over the lanterns (currently the white squares) and set them alight. Completing this task will open a door for you.

If you’re too slow however, the candles will stop burning and you need to set them alight again.

These ghosts will appear in other areas of the game as well where they will simply serve as an enemy/obstacle – you won’t be able to kill them, and as soon as you enter the spirit world they will chase you. I believe I might have mentioned them before in relation to the room with all the creepy bridges, where you’ll have to avoid them while making your way to the other end of the room.

The second mechanic we’ve been playing around with has been something slightly different, yet reminding of something we’ve used before. In Tai Ming we had puzzles where you had to kill statues in the right spot, so that they pressed a button for you. In this dungeon, we’ll do something similar.

Below is the WIP gif:

We use statues as the placeholder graphic here, but they will more likely be some kind of floating armors or some such.

The idea is that these armors only live while in the spirit world, where they follow a set pattern of movement. If you go back into the normal world, they will fall to the ground and remain still. So, the trick here is to adjust the timing of their pattern by hitting them a few times, so that when you return to the regular world, they will each fall on a button if you time it right.

This will be a bit clunky in multiplayer, but we’ve decided on going down the path where it’s enough for one person to be in the spirit world to make them move around. In the GIF above, the adjustments are pretty slim as you hit them, but in the final version we want each hit to make a bigger difference so that you really notice something happens to their patterns when you interact with them.

How do you guys feel about these new puzzle ideas? If you have any others, feel free to share!

Next we’ll start making one of the remaining rooms we’ve yet to finish up; the Mess hall! We’ve showed this room a couple of times already – it’s the room with the creepy bridges. In this first part we’ll get all the basics down, the correct walls and floors as well as some basic decorations; ropes, vines, boxes and so on.

There will be a bunch of floating tables here as well, but those we’ll save for another time. For now, here goes:

First of all after showing the lineart of the Ghost Ship exterior to Teddy and Fred and having some discussions, we’ve decided to change it in a couple ways. First, let’s take a look at what it looked like last:

First thing we wanted was to make the ship a bit higher, so with some quick editing here’s what we came up with:

Then we also wanted to make it longer, adding a broken mast to make sure the area you’ll be fighting in doesn’t get too big. Another sketch of that here:

So with these fixes in mind I went ahead and started with the reworks, also removing the door with the ladder and adding one from the left side instead:

And here’s the finished thing, ready to get colored (unless we decide on changing some more things):

Now, with the ghost ship progressing and most rooms actually already being finished, we’ve come to realize we’ve done something different with this dungeon that we haven’t done before, and we’re not sure it’s a good thing.

Usually we start off with sketches of every room and make sure we can run through each of them in a row, just like the dungeon would actually be, before we make the final art. This time however, because Teddy and Fred were so busy getting the last bits of the desert completed, we decided against that and had me work on making the completed rooms first thing. What that has lead to is that we have a lot of finished rooms, but we haven’t even had a possibility of running through the dungeon in its entirety yet as we usually do.

To remedy this, I’m going to take a break from the ghost ship exterior and focus on making quick sketches for the last bunch of rooms that haven’t been made yet, so that Teddy can put them all into the game and we can try it out and see what it feels like.

That was one of the things we discussed in today’s meeting. The other thing was that strange section I’ve mentioned before, where you’ll find yourself awaken back in Startington, but it’s a Startington that’s weird and kind of off. Previously, we wanted 4 mini “challenges” or events to take place here, but for now we’ve settled for three – each one representing obsession, expectations and deceit. These three elements are key to the story in various ways, and by adding these ‘challenges’ / cutscene things we’d like to put some emphasis on that. The deceit one is still in the sketching phase but will likely involve the artifacts you’ve been collecting in some way… Stay tuned for more on that ;)

…. and here they are! The fantastic sketches made for the remaining rooms of the ghost ship dungeon!

The puzzle one is very unclear right now since we haven’t decided exactly what kind of puzzle we want in there right now. Previously we wanted it to be one of those puzzles where you get chased by something in the ghost world, as I mentioned earlier, but now we’re kind of feeling like putting in a phase shift puzzle instead – can’t have enough of those, right?

The rest of the day we’ve been playing through the dungeon, each room now added by Teddy in a strange world with no colliders or enemies whatsoever, imagining what it’ll all be like when it’s finished. The short of it is that we kind of wish we had done this earlier, but alas, here we are. We got a ton of notes on things to fix now at least, which I’ll be talking about shortly.

Overall though, I think it’ll be fine – it’s a bit of a strange dungeon (but then again, so was Tai Ming), but thanks to the ghost world mechanic and the enemies I think it’ll be interesting.

So the first thing we decided to change when running through the dungeon was the size of the first room – always amazing when your first big change is in the first place you see, right? We felt this room was a bit small and didn’t give the proper introduction to the ship as a big and creepy place the way it should.

Same thing with one of the rooms on the third floor – previously we’ve been making a lot of too large rooms so I started making them a lot smaller since I always overestimated the sizes. Turns out I’ve gone too far the other way not instead, haha! Oh well, for this room it will be an easy fix since it hasn’t even been properly made yet.

Next, there’s a room where we thought we’d have some sort of bullet hell thing going on, but we’ve decided to change that for two reasons: one being that the boss already has a lot of bullet hell elements, and second, the room would be a nice opportunity to embrace the creepiness factor of the world instead. So, instead of an exciting bullet hell, there will be some creepy examining things in an abandoned ghastly kitchen, trying to figure out where a lost key is.

Other than that, there have mostly been minor edits and changes to make, such as more details in some rooms and added features in others, like a bookcase that will fire books at you, and possibly an encounter with a possessed refrigerator and oven – it depends on how further testing goes.

This whole dungeon is pretty strange right now as it’s very finished but also very unfinished, many of the rooms are ready but the encounters and puzzles are not. It’s possible we may need to redesign some parts if the puzzles we want to make don’t work out, but we’ll see! Needless to say, right now we’re doing a lot of discussing and testing back and forth, so we’ll see where things end up when all is said and done.

Meanwhile in Fred’s department, it’s time to finish up the crab enemy! We’ve designed this in a way that is kind of similar to the boar, which I think will become apparent once we start prototyping it. For now, here’s a bunch of its animations during battle:

So cute! I personally think this might be the cutest enemy of the game. Who agrees with me?!