With the desert town progress underway, we decided to make a few changes on the right side of the map before I start rendering those houses. Here’s the original sketch (please excuse the house on the left side which I forgot to remove before saving this):

We decided to change the bottom left house in the picture below to one big two-story house instead, and add a large crate on the right house with a jump down, as well as another jump down on the lower level of the left house. This will make the houses stand out a bit more from the rest, and will look more interesting overall.

We also decided to add an entrance to the topmost house and move the marketplace a bit accordingly. We found that it having no entrance looked a bit empty, and the market place will probably only look better if it’s a little more pushed together:

On to the Ice cream parlor, which as I mentioned had a problem with the mirrored windows. I fixed this and added some silhouettes showing through the glass:

And now, since we have done a bit of work on the lower left side of the map, I decided to tie things together a bit by adding the remaining houses and some decorative stuff. I also replaced the church’s weaponry with Grindea-related imagery:

Now, the desert town creation continues with two new houses, a pair of buildings linked together by a rather thin pair of planks! The one on the left is supposed to be the living quarters of someone, while the one on the right is thought to be a warehouse of sorts. Not sure if both will be open or if we’ll close the doors on the warehouse until we can figure out a cool quest or something to happen in there.

For now, here’s the progress of the exterior:

Next we have the harbor, a rather big undertaking that will have to be divided in multiple parts! First up, the core of it all, the bridges:

These bridges will lead to a number of boats of different sizes, which will be what I focus on next. There will be crates and NPCs unloading cargo and strange items here as well, which is why this part is quite big compared to the rest of the town. By the time everything is finished we hope it’ll be all bustling with activity!

And now, time for another desert portrait! This time it’s the grandpa of the gardener family, the father of the mother who keeps pulling out poor baby carrots. His sprite, made by Fred, was posted a couple of weeks ago first:

This week Fred has been working on a bunch of NPCs, these too for the desert area. First up is several iterations of the NPC responsible for the jumping vegetable enemies posted before! This guy is an old gardener who has become a little.. unhinged in later years… I will say no more than that! Here’s a bunch of iterations, with the final version inside the green circle:

Next up, it’s time to fill the Saloon with people! While the interior of the Saloon hasn’t been made yet, there will be a ton of people there, so Fred has already begun working on a bunch of them!

First, there are two people in the midst of arm wrestling, and a trio playing cards:

There will be more like these coming, as we hope to create a feeling of the Saloon being bustling with activity, card games and entertainment :)

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!

This week it’s finally been time for us to build a new area! It’s a somewhat traditional forest-y area which houses one new enemy, the bowman’s house and a mysterious mansion…

While it’s not in the game yet (soon!), here’s a WIP preview of what it’ll look like:

Yes, as you might guess that means it’s soon time for the bow to reappear in the game! It won’t have its own skill tree like the traditional weapons, but we hope you’ll like it none the less. We’ll talk more about the bow once it’s actually implemented along with the rest of this area.

As for the new enemy, it’s of course the boar that has made an appearance on this blog before! This time, however, it’s animated – and out to get you!

Can you name the Ragnarok Online inspiration? ;)

Now, back to area-building! With some luck, there might be yet another area available soon after this one.. :>

We welcome you this week to the headquarter of The Collectors! This is the place where you’ll get a lot of your quests, and the most important ones at that. But of course, you have to earn your right to actually visit this place by completing a difficult trial first. Will you succeed? I guess we’ll see…

Click for larger version!

This week some people finally moved into the city of Evergrind as well! Here you can see them, minding their own business while waiting for their neighbors to settle :)

 

Last but not least, here’s a banner you’ll be able to see, should you visit Visby in 2½ weeks. Our school is arranging GGC, a small game conference on the island of Gotland and we’ll be there showing off our game live for the first time to the public! We’re very excited to see how people respond after playing it, and as you might guess we’ll be going into beta shortly after that weekend!

 

This week we have spent a lot of time on interface stuff, mainly the skill distribution interface and the shop screen! As they’re not fully implemented you’ll have to wait a bit longer to see how it works, but we promise a video of it in it’s full glory(?) once we’re done!

To move on to more interesting things, Vilya has spent some time of the week doing this abandoned temple that will be a main dungeon in the game!

Click it!

Unfortunately we won’t show any more than the entrance for a while, as we still need to backtrack to get the beta ready & polished, but to make up for it we have a few animations from Fred:

This is a powered up version of the move you saw last week: Blade Flurry. By holding the button for longer, you get that high damaging final strike.

And here’s the equivalent for the two handed overhead attack. If you just press the skill button, you’ll just get one hit off, but if you hold it, you’ll get an additional slash during the startup. This will both yield more damage, and make it easier to land.

Not much to say about this week’s post, except that we’re still working on the Halloween Forest! This week, Vilya has been working on some sweet set pieces, while Fred soldiers on with the many animations. Without further ado, let’s dive right into the pixels!

This here is the house of a candy cooking witch! Somewhere down the line, she must’ve realized candy was better for business than potions. Don’t eat her walls though; she won’t like that…

Here’s an old shrine in a small graveyard, tied to the ancient religion of the world.

On the animation side of things the scarecrow has sprung to life, ready to cause trouble for any collectors traveling through the Halloween Forest!

Next Week: You couldn’t guess: more halloween stuff!

This week has been a little bit all over the place! We have had about a hundred subjects to discuss and plan as a result of soon having to implement the city and all that comes with it.

In short we have designed a fishing mini-game and treasure map system, made a mockup of the arena, sent out descriptions for the next batch of songs we need, made concepts of the first real boss character and finally continued on the various things we left unfinished last week.

We also made some changes in the planning of what stuff to make first, but that is hardly interesting enough to be talking about: instead, let’s take a look at what our group members have been focusing on outside of these discussions.

In the animation department, Fred has continued working on the female bandit leader. So far she’s weighing in at around 20 animations with just one or two left before she’s all done! Here’s another sneak peek of her and her madness:

We know we mentioned NPCs last time, but as a result of changing things and priorities around a bit we’re afraid they will have to wait until after we’re done with the next big thing: the arena!

In the city building district Vilya finished off the houses, all of which are now more or less ready for implementation. Here’s a preview of three of the stores that will be featured in the shopping district:

Can you guess what they are? The purple one is the hat shop, the brown is a smithy and armory, the green is, of course, the alchemist’s potion shop.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“A black clad demon,
raging death in human form,
tamed by tester’s tears.”

(The boss is in the game. She was too difficult at first, but now she’s nicer)

Next Time: The arena takes shape and we go treasure hunting!

A big hug to everyone who’s subscribed to us on Facebook, Twitter and other places! Having people show interest in what you’re doing is a great morale boost.

Let’s celebrate with a recap of the past week!

Fred has made some sweet animations for our first miniboss: a familiar looking, female bandit leader! She’s no behemoth but she might still prove a challenge to the inexperienced adventurer.

Meanwhile, Vilya has started building houses for the main city while battling a terrible cold. The buildings below are common residencies – the shops and other special houses will have huge signs on the roof implying what use they have.

Here’s the sketch she used as reference:

And here’s the end result (still to be tweaked):

The city is going to be fairly big, featuring about 15 buildings (including a smithy, an alchemist store, a hat store, a café and more), a market and the grand Colosseum!

In the coding department, a recoloring shader was made to make the creation of new clothing colors easier. First, a tool turns every spritesheet into a Na’vi, and in-game the shader will recolor it.

This makes it possible to change the colors of individual pieces of clothing separately on the fly, without any additional asset loading.

Next time: The miniboss will be put into the game, and the citybuilding will continue! Maybe we’ll see some NPCs?!