And another week goes by! Last week we finalized Housing and finally managed to get a Stable patch up and running with the whole thing, meaning that (unless there are many more bugs that need fixing), it’s time to focus our attention on those Utility skills! If you are one of those waiting for Stable updates, please go ahead and try housing out, and let us know about how to make it better in the future or any bugs you might find! The full patch notes can be viewed here!

I know a lot of you are sad to hear about there still not being a healing skill, but hopefully the inclusion of the barrier skill will soothe that blow slightly, while still keeping true to our design. So far, we’re all happy about the skill ideas and hope you will be too!

Teddy is currently prototyping the Utility skills using whiteboxing methods (meaning he’s winging the art with what we already have or extremely simple paint art), just to get a feel of how they’ll work in the actual game. Sometimes it becomes very clear even at this stage that some things just don’t work the way we’d like it to, and if that happens it’s unnecessary to have Fred make complex animations for skills that will get cut!

So in the meanwhile, Fred’s continuing to work on the desert enemies until we’re satisfied with the first bunch of skill prototypes, and I’ll continue to focus on the Arcadia Rework, which is likely to be the next step after the Utility skills have been implemented and the skills and battle systems have received an overall rebalance. I’m also continuing to create portraits every now and then, for the inhabitants of the upcoming desert/harbor town, to avoid spending multiple weeks doing nothing but portraits once we get there! Stay tuned :)

For now though, let’s look at what’s been going on last week (aside from the stable patch)!

First up, a list of those Utility skills mentioned last week! Keep in mind, all of the names are working names for now and the effects might differ slightly from the descriptions below, depending on how things work out in the prototyping stage.

First up, the offensive ones:

Challenge – A taunt of sorts, where you make one enemy focus his whole attention on you. This means that if the enemy is currently attacking someone else (in multiplayer for instance), it will immediately target you instead. Under this effect, you’ll deal more damage against this enemy, but it will also deal more damage against you. So, a double edged sword, if you will.

The targeting works much like a projectile: your character will go into a shouting animation in the direction you’re currently facing, and the debuff will apply to the nearest enemy inside the effect.

Death Mark – A debuff that uses a earth spike/meteor style target which you can move between enemies as you hold the skill button. Once you decide which enemy to target they will get a marker on them that will look like a meter of sorts. As you deal damage to this enemy, the meter will fill up and once it’s full or a timer runs out, it’ll deal a percentage of the damage you’ve already done to the enemy as bonus damage. It will also trigger immediately once the damage it’d deal is enough to kill the enemy.

Sleep – A skill that puts an enemy to sleep and makes it unable to attack. However, if you hit the enemy it will wake up and return to battle. The duration each enemy sleeps may vary on their type and level. There will probably be a global limit for this skill, where only one enemy can be asleep at the same time. This means that if you or any of your friends cast the skill on another enemy, the one currently sleeping will wake up as the new one falls asleep.

For the defensive skills, we have:

Meditate – A skill that you hold to regenerate EP at a greater speed. As we rebalance the skills it’s likely we’ll edit how EP works slightly, making it regenerate more slowly (among other things) – which means this skill will be more useful for more people than it might currently be. We also have an idea that if you charge x% of your EP and reach max using Meditate, the next spell will cast will be cast for free.

Shield – A shield you can cast around yourself or a friend that absorbs some damage. If the shield HP runs low and you get hit by an attack that finishes off the shield, you will take the remaining damage of the shield-breaking attack, so beware!

In single player, this shield is cast like a regular skill, while in multiplayer holding the button will bring you into a wheel (like when you control the Frosty Friend), which shows the faces of you and each of your friends characters. Press up to cast the shield on yourself, or right to cast it on player number two, etc.

The shield will also have some kind of perfect guard effect, if you manage to cast it right before you or your friend would get hit by an incoming attack, but we haven’t decided exactly what this will be yet.

Blink – A short-range teleport ability that auto targets some distance away. This means that if you tap the skill you will blink across the screen, but if you hold the button down you can move the target around to change where you land.

Finally, there’s the two buff spells:

Offense – Boosts damage, speed and crit.

Defense – Boosts defense, shield regeneration and EP regeneration.

One important disclaimer in relation to these skills is that they’re all subject to change depending on your feedback or our experience while testing them out! For now though, this is the lineup we’re looking at and right now we all agree it’s gonna make things much more interesting :)

Now, time for another portrait: the summer fae luring her winter fae friend to the desert town!

As with the other harbor/desert town characters, nothing has been properly decided about these characters, but my general idea is that she took her friend with her, and while she enjoys herself he has a hard time dealing with the climate! I guess we’ll see if that story makes it in the end, once we finally start implementing the town.

In the Arcadia rework business, it’s time to introduce Remedi’s Alchemy, an important part of your future arcade runs…

In this first part we focus on the wagon itself, and in the next we’ll add a bunch of interesting surroundings: strange and mystical flowers that have luring the alchemist to this remote town!

Finally, let’s end this week by taking a look at what Fred has kept himself busy with: the Solem animations! In order of appearance: Appear (spawn), attack, dig (for when he charges at you), grab (as he appears from beneath your feet to hit you), and a regular movement animation!

Important to notes is that these are still in the ‘sketch’ stage, so they need some cleaning up (as you can see on a few, there are holes in the middle of the poor Solem). This is the way Fred prefers to work when he creates animations: first making a rough sketch, then filling in more and more details until they’re properly polished (and all holes removed).

With Fred back in town we had a meeting, as mentioned last week, where we discussed two important things: the new housing patch feedback and something I know many have long awaited… the support skills!

When it comes to the housing build tools, there actually haven’t been much feedback to speak about, which we take as a good thing: hopefully that means they weren’t too confusing! There are still some things we’d like to polish, though – for instance, some kind of visual effect for the clear and delete functions (as the items/rooms disappear).

We also want you to be able to add more than one door to a room, and by doing so connecting it to others. To do this, we’ll add a ‘connect’ button in the menu, which allows you to add another doorway between two rooms that are next to each other but not yet connected.

What about the support skills, then? Well, we’ve come up with eight different skills, which will be introduced in more detail at a later date. For now, let’s talk about the changes compared to what the support trees look like now:

For one, the skill category will change name from “Support” to the more versatile “Utility”. Our reasoning is that with a name like support, many players who expect to play the classical support role will automatically hone in on the support tree without checking the other trees first. However, while these new utility skills will likely make playing a support-like character more fun (compared to the current skills), we want to make a point of the fact that you can pick and choose from any of the skill categories, and use the Utility ones as bonus abilities, rather than either ignoring the tree or focusing too much on it due to the support name.

Inside Utility category there will be three trees: Offensive (3 skills), Defensive (3 skills) and Buffs (2 skills). The old support skills will be completely removed.

Finally, the utility skills won’t use the charge system, and won’t use up gold points. The way we’ve designed them now, they will cap at 5 skill points and only use silver – but this might change as we begin to prototype them and play around with them within the game.

Since the support skills are mainly Teddy and Fred’s area, I’ve focused on other things this week!

First up, I’m continuing work on Tai Ming’s arcade mode stuff, and it begins with changing the initial size of the rooms:

As you can see in the above image, our first version was pretty huge, larger than the biggest room in Flying Fortress (which I believe is the biggest room in all of Arcade Mode to this point). It still is very big, even after we changed the size a little, but less extreme.

So anyway, first thing I had to do was change the size of each of the walls I made currently, and then I went on to add openings/exits for each of them, as seen below:

The mountain walls only need an exit (or rather, entrance), to the bottom, since you’ll only use it once as you come through a Mount Bloom exit!

Then, I started working on another type of wall, featuring houses! Tai Ming is a town, after all… Here are a few of the ones I made in combination with some of the other walls:

When making these “house walls”, or more town like walls for the Tai Ming rooms, I wanted to make sure they could work both alone and next to water or other walls. In order to make this work, I made small versions of each, that are small ends just before the water edges, in case they are placed in a room with some kind of water. I then made four corners (seen above) than can be added to each of the walls to make them longer, for when there’s just greenery in the room, and no water.

An example of this can be seen below. The vertical edges of the battle area used here are the smaller versions, with the corners added on top but not bottom sides, in order to make room for the water that flows there:

Here’s another example, with a single corner connecting the short vertical and short horizontal edges of the battle room. It also showcases how you can use both a water edge and the stone wall together:

Third version, with corners on the left side! Also as you can see, there are a bunch of variations of the layouts, which means hopefully there shouldn’t be too many repeating walls:

And here we have one with only the short versions and no corners:

The actual battle area needs some grass decorations (that is likely to be random generated), but other than that I think we’re nearing something that feels a little more complete. Now we just need to feed these walls into the game engine and figure out in which ways to connect them to make the rooms look interesting and cool!

Now, it’s been a while since we made the first step in the progress of revamping Arcadia, but it’s finally time for another: Candy’s brother Muffin makes an appearance, ready to give you treats that will make your arcade runs easier!

The final form can be viewed below:

And below’s the map as of now! Quite a way to go yet, but we’re slowly getting there:

In Fred’s department, the desert enemies continue to take shape! This time around he has finished up the Mrs. Bird animations and moved on to the Solem~

See how another Mrs. Bird spawns out of the egg of another? We have a feeling this enemy will be quite annoying, hopefully in a good way! The Solem, meanwhile, will be a lone beast, few and far between due to their strength.

Since all paths will be open to the player (once the maps are actually in the game) we plan on sticking one of these guys near the entrance of the desert, deterring any stray new players on their way to Pumpkin Woods from going the wrong direction. One bout with this guy and hopefully they realize they took a wrong turn and continue down the right path! …or perhaps it’ll become a challenge to some, to see how soon they can best these high level beasts? Looking forward to seeing all the cheese strats! :)

As a bonus, Fred has created a step-by-step for the initial creating of the Solem, from sketch to finished sprite:

Excited to battle yet? I know I am.. But first we have some support skills and Arcade Mode reworks to finish :D

In case you missed it, the housing patch is now up and running, so if you haven’t tried that yet, go ahead and test it!

The initial feedback seems very positive, and I’m actually surprised to see how many of you seem to really enjoy building your houses! The interiors that have been posted all look great and so creative, I didn’t even know you could make such cool layouts with the things we made so far. Thank you for that all of you! We’re still going to introduce a ton of new pieces of furniture, of course, and we’ve already gotten a ton of cool ideas based on your suggestions! If you have any more ideas for housing and what to do with it, please go ahead and let us know by commenting or posting on our forums!

Now, we’ve decided that we do want to further improve the housing system – specifically the layout – and we’d rather do it now while it’s fresh in our minds rather than sometime in the future. Since we estimate the development time will be more or less the same between creating pre-designed layouts or having you guys make those layouts yourselves, we’ve also decided to go for the the later, allowing you more freedom in your house building endeavors.

This of course means a whole new set of design decision that needs to be ironed out before things can be implemented properly. For one, we need some kind of build tool where you can edit the walls, pull them down or up and change the size of each individual room. This will be a challenge in itself, but will have to wait until the system runs properly (Teddy has already started working on this).

Second, we had to discuss whether increasing your house size would be completely free or something you pay gold to do. The idea we came up with is that each tile/square in the house represents a number of “Lumber” (might change the name later). This means that as you expand your house you’ll use up lumber, but should you make it smaller again, you’ll regain them. You will be able to purchase the lumber at the carpenter store for gold, though we haven’t decided how expensive it will be yet.

As now, there will be a minimum number of tiles each room can be, but you’ll have a lot of options in terms of the shape, since you’ll be able to move each wall tile up or down. While this system will need a lot of fine tuning, I think it’ll be great in the end!

As for the general feedback we’ve received since the housing launch, two requests stood out above the rest: bookcases facing sideways and chairs facing upwards!

The reason we didn’t include sideways-facing bookcases was, honestly, because we thought it looked boring and we thought nobody would be interested in that anyway. After listening to your feedback, we know we were wrong, and agree that there’s definitely uses for them – and so they will be added in an upcoming patch!

Along with the bookcase update, there will also be chairs facing upwards, so you can put chairs in all directions. We always intended to include these, but for some reason, we kept forgetting to actually make them. Oops!

As per request, there will also be a style for the female statue without the moss, as pictured below:

As you can see, there’s also a bunch of beds in that picture, and you might wonder why. Well, we’ve had a discussion about the perspective in the game and whether some items look better in their correct form or not.

You see, the vertical beds that are currently in the game are wrong according to the perspective – they are much smaller than they should be, compared to the horizontal version – and Teddy suggested we should correct it since it was something that bothered him as he was flipping between the two.

When I took the above screen, I had started fixing the vertical beds, but something felt kind of off. I asked Teddy to upload the Pumpkin Woods bed so we could test it and compare it to the old, smaller version.

Turns out we ended up preferring the smaller one, even though it’s technically wrong. For some reason, the beds end up feeling huge when they’re in their correct size, and it actually felt a lot worse than flipping between the original ones. I will still fix two that felt a little too small, but the rest will be kept the same, and the “fixed” versions will go to the trashcan!

Another thing that will be added is the !-mark seen above. It will appear above important notices, and serves as a warning of sorts. Or just to make the boxes a little more interesting-looking, if you will!

We also decided to do a bunch of fixes to items that didn’t properly fit within their tiles/squares, making placing them in a house rather awkward. First up, the beer keg, which has been changed to a bigger version. In the original, left version, it was simply too small and left a lot of space on each side. Making it even smaller (to fit a single square) wasn’t an option, so instead we decided to make it a lot bigger. It now takes up 4 squares, and while there’s still some space remaining, there’s not nearly as much of it:

Next up, some of the Temple of Seasons bushes, which used to take up about 1.5 squares, also making them very annoying to place within your house. For these, we decided to make them smaller instead:

This flower crate also got a smaller version, which now fits a single square as well:

The Pumpkin Woods bench and chair, which weren’t pictured above:

We’ve also started working on a new object, which is a weapon stand where you can place your 1- or 2-handed weapons to show off within your house. In the top left corners of the below picture, you can see two of our iterations for the 1h version. In the end, it’ll be something closer to the right one, as it shows off the weapon better and feels more balanced:

In semi-related news, another thing that will be included in the next patch is the long-awaited feature of being able to skip quests you previously finished in a multiplayer session! Before this patch airs, you’ve had to redo every single quest in single player, regardless of how far you got with your friends (unless you were the one hosting). Now, you’ll get a notification about having completed any given quest in a previous multiplayer run, and the option to skip to the end of it:

As for Fred, his focus has been more enemy animations, as well as laying the groundwork graphically for those weapon stands that will feature any weapon of your choosing as a housing item!

In order to make the weapon stands work, Fred selected a frame from one of the attack animations featuring each sword and edited it to fit the weapon stand sprite. He also had to add a hilt to each of the ones that needed one, since he never made on for the animations: the main character’s hand typically covers where it would have been.

And as for the enemy animations, things are moving forward with the desert enemies and in particular with the Mrs Bird enemy:

Finally, there’s another portrait for the upcoming desert town! A winter fae, to boot – Talk about getting out of ones element!

This poor guy has been dragged along to the desert by a summer fae friend. How cruel! He doesn’t particularly seem to enjoy the heat, does he?

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that being a gamedev involves more than simply making games and managing the community surrounding it. Today (when this gets posted, a while ago) we had our “annual meeting”, which is a formal thing we need to do to review the year and how the company has fared through it.

This year we also formalized and signed contracts surrounding Secrets of Grindea and its IP, protecting it and us in the unlikely case we no longer get along. While we trust each other 100% it’s so much easier making these contracts while there are no issues, rather than try to solve any such issues as they arise in a not-so-likely future. In fact, we should have done this years ago, before we even started selling the game.

If you’re an aspiring gamedev, I very strongly advise you look into getting a contract outlining exactly what each of you will be doing for the company and what happens in the case where one or several of you want out. You might think there will never be any problems ahead, but you never know, and it’s better to be protected than to wish you had been. Also, money can easily change people, and I’ve seen countless horror stories out there where devs no longer get along once they start selling their game as opposed to it being a dream.

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Now, some time has passed since we started the poll regarding which of the Tai Ming Arcade floor designs you’d prefer – backtrack through time or random time jumps. At the moment of writing this, it seems you guys are as divided as we are, so for the time being we’re leaning slightly towards the backtracking idea.

This means each of the rooms have to be made available in both a past and a present version. And speaking of the floor visuals, how would we even go about designing an Arcade floor of an area that’s more of a town than any of the previous areas you’ve progressed through?

To sort this out, I had a long meeting with Teddy where we sketched and discussed the various ways we could handle this.

In conclusion, we’ve decided to make the floors in a very different way compared to the others. For the other floors, each room background is either very designed by me, with variations to give the user an impression of there being more rooms than there actually is (Flying Fortress, Mount Bloom etc), or they are fully generated by the engine that puts a bunch of trees in a circle on top of a basic background (Evergrind Fields, Seasonne, etc). For Tai Ming, we’re going to do a mix of the two.

We decided that each outdoor room of Tai Ming will consist of a plain grass background, upon which we’ll put various things that will serve to block the screen so that you can’t move further than the square where you’ll be fighting. These things will include various fences, mountain walls, streams of water and houses, either ones you will enter or closed ones that will only serve to block your way forward.

Each of these items will be generated into the game by the engine, but they will have to be handmade by me to fit into each situation. For instance, there needs to be a way for a horizontal and vertical fence/stream/mountain wall to connect, and they need to be able to work with each other – a fence must be able to connect to the mountain wall, for instance.

To make these floors coherent we’ll frame them with the mountain, meaning the the bottom, far right/left and topmost floors will have a corresponding mountain wall – it will be in the upper parts of the topmost floors, signifying that you cannot go further north than this. We believe this will give the floors a sense of you progressing through Tai Ming much like it works in Story Mode, you’re passing through a town that’s inside the mountain. Because there’s a lot of water in Tai Ming’s second zone and we thought it would make the rooms a more interesting look, there will be streams here and there that you can pass over (in some rooms) by bridges, that will also be made by me but generated into the game by the engine as it creates each floor.

So basically, instead of painting whole rooms, I will spend a lot of time making and piecing together many, many small parts, that need to work both on their own and be able to connect with others as they get generated by the game!

As for the indoor rooms, they will (for now) be single room living areas in a bunch of variations, but with entrances and exits in the same place: if you enter a house from the south you’ll exit it in the north, and if you enter a house from the right you’ll exit it to the left. Since we’ve already dealing with quite complex backgrounds we thought we’d keep the indoor houses simple. This way we don’t have to make a ton of variations of the house sprites (the outodoor ones) that would have to look different if the house is L-shaped or longer than one room. Now we can focus on giving each of the exits variations through color and design rather than the shape, which would also end up affecting the other pieces made for the outdoor areas.

Creating these floors properly will definitely be a challenge, and more on the technical side than what we normally do, but we believe this will make these floors look the best they can. Our other options would be to make a ton of pre-rendered rooms (a bunch with the mountain wall to the bottom, a bunch with the wall to the left, etc) or lose the coherency of where the mountain floors and walls connect, and we all agree that just wouldn’t be as nice.

In other words, expect a post or two full with tiny parts and ways of connecting them! ;)

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And now, for something else! Among these other things I’ve also started working on the proper Arcadia graphics now that the design is settled! Here’s a video featuring the first part, Candy’s Curses:

And here’s the whole map! I thought I’d post this after every new step, to show you the town slowly taking shape:

One I’ve made all the finished buildings, I’ll make the flat version with signposts where the buildings will be. The reason I’m starting with the finished buildings is so that each plot will be big enough: it’s a little hard to tell exactly how big a building will end up being before I’ve painted it and it’s surroundings, and I want to be able to adjust the paths and greenery to fit the built versions :)

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Back to housing! We’ve had multiple discussions regarding table cloths and how to apply them to various tables. Finally, we’ve come to a decision!

Basically, we had two options. Either we’d make a ton of basic table cloths that had to fit each of the tables, or we’d make unique styles for each table, with table cloths (and other decorations) specifically made for that object.

In the end, we decided to go with the second option, for multiple reasons. For one, the tables aren’t all exactly as big, which means it’ll be quite a challenge to make sure every table cloth fits each and every table. Second, it’s more fun for us to design table cloths to go with each table, rather than have to design around all tables with the limitation of size as mentioned. It also makes each table you buy a little more interesting, as it comes with its own unique styles.

And without further ado, here’s a bunch of the table cloths we’ve made so far:

…With more to come!

And while we’re on the subject of housing, have another bunch of Fred’s animated housing items:

So, Tai Ming has been fully added to frontline: what happens next? Once we’ve polished up Tai Ming for a stable release, there are a ton of things we want to add before moving on to the next area, and many of these will probably get their own Frontline and Stable releases:

1. Housing
We’ve talked about it a lot, and it’s finally on its way! Almost all basic batches are completed, although we’ll keep adding items as we come up with them. All that remains is polishing up the interface and for Teddy to implement like a hundred items…

2. Support Skills
Seeing as there’s only one area and two dungeons left of the game, it’s high time these got implemented. We still haven’t decided 100% which ones they’ll be, but we have a lot of nice ideas that we hope will make things interesting for support players as well. More on this later~

3. The Potion Rework
I mentioned it before, and we definitely want to implement this ASAP as well! Makes potions more interesting.

4. Rebalance
A rebalance of pretty much everything, including giving magic users a tiny bit of range for their normal attacks.

5. Arcade Mode Rework + New Floors
As we’ve talked about before on the blogs! This will likely happen after the above things, since the support skills, rebalance and potion rework will affect things in Arcade Mode, and a complete rework will probably increase the amount of players trying it out (which means it’s nice to already have those in the game at that point)

6. Quest Skipping After Multiplayer Completion
This has been on our feature list forever. Basically after you complete quests and stuff in a multiplayer session you’re supposed to get an option for skipping them when you go back to playing single player.

7. Season Orbs and ..Plant Nutrition..?
A lot of you have noticed tiny wiggly plants and areas where it looks like you should be able to cross the water somehow. Since these things have trolled you long enough, we feel it’s time to actually implement their ‘solutions’, namely Season Orbs for crossing water and ….some kind of plant nutrition to make the plants grow.

We’ve had various ideas about the nutrition either being available throughout the world or sold by Oak in the farm in Evergrind West. Still haven’t finalized that part but it’s likely we’ll finally implement it before the desert!

8. A Special Side Quest & Treasure Maps
More treasure maps because a bunch of them are already prepared, and the special side quest because the reward we have planned for it is something that might be interesting to use for players while they await the next patch.

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And then, it’s on to the desert! This will probably take a while to complete, but once it’s all implemented there isn’t a lot to add aside from more side activities (quests, arena challenges, boss rebattling, etc) which we’ll likely save for after the main story is done. How exciting to take another step closer to that point!

And to jumpstart all of that, let’s jump straight into the stable priority stuff! First up: shop upgrades for when you reach Tai Ming!

So yeah, we wanted to upgrade the shops with some new items once you reach the inner levels of Tai Ming, since most of the shop items have been around for a bit at that point. We decided to upgrade the three rings that are already in the game with a second tier, basically a stronger version of the previous one. We also wanted a new armor piece, and a bunch of new accessories:

We haven’t decided exactly what the accessories will do yet, just that we wanted a bunch of new ones. There are a ton of builds that need new items though (basically like all of them), so I’m sure we’ll come up with a number of alternatives before they get implemented~

Finished sprites:

There are still a lot of miniatures / drop sprite versions of a bunch of items left to do as well, so here’s another video featuring the making of the Mount Bloom special items:

The first two mushrooms didn’t get recorded because I forgot to turn off Aero, so OBS recorded me painting on top of a grey screen instead, haha! Oh well :D

Finished sprites (in 300%, in case you’re wondering why they look bigger than the ones above):

Since I’m waiting for Fred to complete the additional NPCs that will appear in Tai Ming’s first zone, here’s a preview of a couple more Mount Bloom room types for Arcade Mode!

Making these rooms are a little bit of a challenge: they can’t be too small with the Larvacid and Spinsects enemies ruling this section of the game, but with too large rooms there also won’t be much of a challenge!

Hopefully these slightly smaller rooms (compared to the last batch) are balanced enough to make it a fun challenge!

I think I’ll make one more room type that is slightly more rounded, and then a few variations of some of the room with water decorations as seen in some of Mount Blooms early maps. After that we’ll hopefully have enough variations, given the many different decoration combos that can appear in each room!

I keep worrying the difference between each of the rooms won’t be enough, but considering there isn’t much difference between most rooms throughout the other Arcade Mode floors it should probably be fine (especially with our new and improved mix-and-match system that mixes and matches various decoration setups for each of the corners).

Mostly I suppose people are too busy worrying about not dying to consider how closely two rooms resemble each other… :)

Next week we’ll continue to flesh out Tai Ming for a stable release, and the work on Arcade Mode and its rework continues~

With the third Tai Ming zone up and running, and the base of the dungeon essentially completed, it’s only natural to have a meeting to discuss the feedback we’ve gotten!

Before uploading the patch our inhouse testers had given us two point of views on the third zone: one said it was impossibly hard, the other said it’s too easy. The general consensus after uploading the patch seem to be it’s somewhere in between those two (yay), but we’ll keep monitoring your comments and make adjustments to the difficulty accordingly.

Aside from the usual bunch of bugs and a couple hotfixes, things seems to be sailing pretty smoothly and now all that remains is cleaning up the placeholders, await sound effects and polish things up for the stable release, which is our next goal!

So, for the next stable release, we’ll basically clean up Tai Ming to the best of our ability and launch the dungeon when it’s properly completed. We’ll also be adding a couple of things to the dungeon before patching as well, namely:

* A couple more NPCs in Tai Ming’s first zone
* A secret chest…somewhere I won’t say
* New shop items

We’ll also make a slight change to the Mimic battle so that the Mimic spits out the sword if you solve the puzzle mid-fight. It felt a bit unsatisfying to push the block onto it only to be rewarded with nothing until the battle’s done, so that had to be fixed!

Now, as for what happens after Tai Ming… Previously we had an idea that we’d do a vote for what you people would like to see added, but after discussing our options today we realized there are so many things we feel need to be added ASAP, that we’ll probably end up doing all of those and only save the super optional stuff for later. More on that later!

Some other things we’ve discussed recently:

What year is it?
Some of you might have asked this question already, with all the time jumps in the dungeon! We’ve had multiple discussions about whether or not to include years, either when you zone or/and added somewhere in your journal.

The obvious argument for is that it would hopefully make it easier to know how much time has passed between certain events. However, there’s also the risk of annoying people who forgot what the previous year was, and now gets another year presented. This happens to me a lot in movies: in the beginning they show the setting and present us with which year it is, and I go “oh okay so we’re in the 1600’s”, and promply forget what the last two numbers where. Then, a while later, there’s a jump and they show another year, also 1600’s, but since I didn’t remember the whole year I have no idea how many years have passed in either direction (is it a flashback?), until I get it based on the context. In those cases the years did nothing but annoy me, since I had to rely on the context to grasp how much time has passed anyway.

It is our hope that we’ve provided the player with enough such context that there isn’t a need to know the exact year. We haven’t completely thrown out the idea though – if it becomes too confusing, we might add them later.

The Desert
After Tai Ming comes the desert, and as such we had another talked and decided that before we update the Stable beta, we’ll add the bare minimum of the first desert map – most likely only the background and something blocking your way from continuing (so no enemies or NPCs or anything like that).

The reason? Those “this area is not in the game yet” notifications. Once we add the first desert map we actually won’t have any of those anymore, and I’m pretty sure you guys are just as annoyed by them as we are! Nothing throws you out of a game as much as a blatant reminder that you’re only playing the beta.

Temple of Seasons Story?
And now for something completely different. Did you know that we, from the beginning, intended to have picture carvings here and there in the Temple of Seasons, telling the story about the player character’s mother Charlotte and how she came to save the fae that one time? Don’t worry, we won’t add that right now, but we did have enough time during this meeting to reiterate that we will add it at some point. Likely after the main story is done.

Spirit World Objects
Finally, we talked a bit about the spirit world and what kind of objects should appear when using the skill. We want certain things to be able to appear in order to create puzzles and challenges – such as a bridge that only exists in the spirit world, and so on. During this discussion we talked about what they should look like graphic wise.

Right now we’re thinking that we should go full on horror style – having the objects be made of bones or dark goo or other creepy things you’d associate with ghosts. We’re still balancing on an edge where we’re not sure if it’s gonna be too creepy or not (the game hasn’t been that scary until that point, even if we begin to see some darker things in Tai Ming), but hopefully it’ll not feel too off in the end.

If you guys have any suggestions for what you’d like to see graphic wise in the spirit world, let us know in the comments! :)

Since we’re currently busy airing out the bugs that have been reported, adding sound effects and basically polishing up the graphics, which isn’t much to show visually in this blog, here’s a sneak peek of the Mount Bloom Arcade Mode floors instead!

To make these floors, we’ll be using a bunch of basic room backgrounds as base, and create variations by decorating them in different way. When creating the bases I make a standard background, add some basic decorations that don’t need colliders (basically floor and wall stuff, such as moss and vines), as well as four exits – one in each direction:

The exits are on their own layer, and beneath is a solid wall, so you can simply apply the number of exits you need for the specific room. Some might only have one door, others might use all four.

I then make a second and sometimes a third variation of the basic decorations, moving moss and wall decorations around so they aren’t all exactly the same:

Next step is adding props that have colliders, which are added using our editor. In order to increase the sense of variation we divide each backgrounds into four parts, and create a minimum of two variations in how the props are placed within each corner.

Once that is done, the game engine will be able to mix and match each corner for the background, creating 16 possible variations per background, if each corner has 2 different layouts:

The basic room shapes are the same, but thanks to different numbers of doors and decoration differences, they feel more different than they are. These are only the first two room types, next I’ll be making a bunch more to increase the sense of variation as you progress through this floor.

…..aaand as of yesterday, the frontline patch is finally up!! This includes the third and final part of Tai Ming (albeit without the proper sound effects and with some placeholder stuff). Patch notes can be found here!

Naturally this weekend has been spent crunching a bunch of stuff we wanted to include in this patch, so we’re all quite spent and now eagerly await your feedback. For me, a playthrough took about 40 minutes – how long did it take you? What did you think of the twists and turns? How was the balance? Please feel free to share anything and everything here in the comment section of on any of our forums!

For now, here’s a bunch of sneak peek GIFs of what you’ll be facing in the third and final part of this dungeon:

Since you’ll be able to play through our progress this time, this blog post is kept rather short since I’m sure you all would much rather be playing! Please go ahead and do so, and let us know all of your feedback <3

Thanks! :D

Another week has passed, which has been another week filled with preparing for the final Tai Ming boss. Finally, we’ve completed the third and last stage of the Mimic boss room… Time to bring in some Mt. Bloom!

So basically in this third stage you’re back to your own time, but we wanted this room to be more ruined than the rest in order for some health crystals to have grown in the room after this time jump! The boss battle is very long, after all, and being so close to Mount Bloom we thought this was a nice solution for including some health without forcing random health orbs.

The health crystals aren’t pictured in the finished version below, but they’ll be growing in the parts where the cave floor is peeking through:

Another thing we’ve been focusing on lately is the cutscenes surrounding the Mimic fight. And with this one, we have a question for you guys!

Above you can see one of the cutscenes we’ve been prototyping lately. Now the question is: when should the boss portrait appear? We have two suggestions:

In this first alternative, the boss portrait (yes it’s a thorn-worm for now, since the real one hasn’t been made yet) appears as the Mimic sucks the crown into its chest.

…And in this one it appears as its tongue is around the crown, pausing mid-animation.

What do you guys think? We’re currently torn, and while it might not seem like a huge decision, it’s always better to pick the version that the most people like better! When I asked this in my own work blog, the overwhelming result so far indicates the second one is better. Do you agree? Please comment with your preference! :D

Now, we can’t let the Mimic boss portrait remain a thorn-worm now, can we? Time to fix that!

We are actually not yet sure if this will be *the* boss portrait, or if we’ll have several, one for each state. So before making this one, I made some quick sketches to work out what size each of the iterations would have in their portrait versions, should we decide to add the other ones:

For now though, we are gonna start with just the small one, and play around with adding the other two in a prototype, to get a sense of what it’d feel like to have them appear after you complete each iteration:

What do you think? Would you like to have a new boss portrait appear every time you beat one version of the Mimic, or do you feel it would get too spammy, throwing you out of the mood of the battle? I guess it’s hard to imagine without actually trying out the fight, though.. Maybe we should include a way to try out the different versions in next frontline update, unless it would mean too much work for our poor overworked programmer!

And now, some mixed stuff!

First up, fixing a graphical error shown above! Behind the door transparency the closed door peeked through, rather than the floor. It has now been fixed.

I also added a bunch of extra decorations for the second fighting room in zone 3. It just looked a bit empty, so I felt it needed a bit more polish:

I also adjusted the garland you’ll unlock in the Seasonne batch of housing items, making sure it’s properly stackable. Previously, you had to put them next to each other like in the left version below, but by editing the size they will now stack seamlessly when you put two next to eachother:

Finally, we’re swapping out the map painting in the Mimic boss room for a portrait of Grindea! Progress and finished versions below:

Now, a lot of you have asked when frontline will be updated with the third Tai Ming area. Here’s our estimate: HOPEFULLY this weekend! We’ll do our very best to make that happen, at least :)

Remember the Mimic boss? Improvements have been made, and the prototyping goes on!

Since the last prototype we decided to keep the waves he spits out, but with mixed enemies, so there will be enemies from all around the world rather than from one area at a time. We also removed a couple of waves, since this fight likely is long enough as it is – this is stage 3 after all!

Occasionally while you battle the wave(s) he spits out, the Mimic will launch random disables or damage dealing stuff as well. These can be anything from bombs, slime, rockets, fire – you name it! These will be random, but certain disables/attacks don’t unlock until you’ve progressed far enough in the fight.

Yet another step closer to finishing the map! Now there’s mainly a ton of animations and polish, polish, polish remaining!! :D

…And of course… The actual background for the fight!

Right now the prototype version of the boss room looks like below (which can also be seen in the GIFs above):

After doing some thinking & talking, I made a sketch preview of what the finish thing could look like, and had it approved by Teddy and Fred before I began work:

The most complicated thing in the room is probably the painting – which we, oh irony, have decided to swap out for another one yet to be made. For now, here’s this one, which will likely appear somewhere else in Tai Ming instead:

And here’s the finished room for the first stage:

As the fight progresses, you will jump through time and the room will change. And so… On to stage two! For this one, some time has passed and it’s time to break and demolish the props inside:

As I made this I did not yet know the painting would get swapped out, and so it too got a ruined version, though I do not yet know if that will be in the game or not. Maybe this will be the only time you’ll ever be able to see it, so take a good look!! ;)

For the next stage, we jump back to our own time, and this particular room of Tai Ming has seen some serious ruin compared to the rest. But first…. some more housing miniatures!

With Tai Ming and Mount Bloom’s housing items finished, it’s time to create their miniatures and add them to the game, and this time I thought we’d mix it up with a video!

Only the basic items for each batch in this one – the video would be way to long otherwise! More to follow in another post. For now, here’s the result from this vid:

And the large versions for comparison:

That’s all for this week! Next week the work on the boss room continues, and we begin piecing together the cutscenes one by one. Stay tuned!

Another week has gone by, this one focused on finishing up the second to last Tai Ming map, more housing items, and a lot of prototyping action!

A lot of things will happen on the courtyard map we showed last week, so it needs a whole bunch of different states. First, I’ll add some dirt and burn effect to the ground where the fire is raging:

Basically I paint dirt wherever the fire is, and repaint any bushes, trees, etc to darker, burned crisp versions. Some props, like the whack-able bushes, get completely destroyed and only leave a stump behind. While it would probably be more realistic to just remove everything except for maybe the trees, we felt like keeping the props with a burn effect on would make the map look more interesting than if everything was simply removed.

I also changed the color of the grass in the circle to a slightly more yellow-reddish hue, which would go along better with the flames:

Of course, once the effect we showed last week is put on top of this, things will look slightly different. But there’s a basic preview, anyway!

Now, time for some polish!

Previously I had not yet added the door in the back of the courtyard, so I went ahead and made that. There’s both an opened and closed version:

Since I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the way the cloth fall at the end of the ‘altar’, I decided to go back and edit the shape slightly:

The courtyard still felt a bit empty, and not messy enough (some stuff is going down!), so I threw in a bunch of planks, some broken glass, and other stuff. In the burned version, I added a burn effect only on the parts of each object that’s within the fire:

Finally, due to another time jump, there was need of a version of this place after the fire, where some time has passed. In order to illustrate that we added some newly grown grass, but not too much, since not that much time has passed at this point:

And now, the final part of the courtyard project: the present version!

First up, a GIF of the demolishing progress of the entrance/exit:

And then, a GIF of the transformation of the whole area! As usual, it’s all about breaking down items and adding more greenery. This map too will have two versions, one with a closed door and one with it open:

Final thing (some objects will be replaced automatically by the game engine):

In the housing department, it’s time to create the batch unlocked by entering Seasonne, and here are the basic items that will be available~

While there aren’t a ton of christmas-y items here yet, rest assured there will be a whole bunch of them before I’m done with this batch! Christmas trees, piles of presents, greenery hanging on the wall, christmas stockings…! Just you wait and see.

Also, feel free to suggest other christmas-inspired items (or any kind, really) here or on the forums :3

And now, some of Fred’s animations, featuring the second stage of the Mimic fight: