As we’re moving on to implementing Mt. Bloom, it’s about time we added a way into the actual cave system, right? That’s one of the tasks Vilya was working on last week:

As you might have guessed, you’ll be using a Season Orb to turn part of the area into a frozen winter state! There will also be an ice bridge, animated by Fred, that will appear and take you across :)

On the inside of Mt. Bloom, we’re still in the process of adding greenery, making it properly bloom-y:

We also started implementing and prototyping the enemies that will appear in the cave! Here are a few GIFs of that in action:

As you can see, there’s a lot of placeholder art here: the tiny mushrooms and acid will be recolored, and the enemy mushrooms won’t turn into Jumpkins when you hit them… ;) Overall, these GIFs should give you an idea of how the enemies work, though!

Basically, the Spinsects spin around the room, bouncing off the walls. They’ll speed up if you hit them, so be careful where you stand! The mushrooms are a typical Jumpkin enemy, chasing you across the map. Once they die, they’ll leave a bunch of tiny mushrooms on the ground that blind you if you step on them. The larva ignores you, but leaves a trail of acid that deals damage over time if you step in it. Like the Spinsects, it will go faster if you hit it, but will stop to catch it’s breath after a little while :)

In order to unlock the way into the next temple, you’ll be doing a set of challenges inside the mountain. Last week we started prototyping one of them, where you’ll direct Spinsects into a large boulder in order to break it.

Here’s a suuuper early sneak peak, using only placeholder art that will be replaced in the near future:

Stay tuned for next week and more Mt. Bloom stuff! :D

Another week has gone by, in which a new fronline update was released! In this update you will battle a mini-boss and investigate a suspicious character… For full patch notes, check the game client or this thread!

We’d love to hear your feedback on this new encounter and the surrounding story elements, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment here or on the forums!

Moving on, though, Vilya has been doing some improvements to the Mt. Bloom maps now that they’re finally about to be added to the game:

Basically, tons of new greenery and details!

Meanwhile, Fred was busy creating the mess that is the Collector’s HQ now that the patch is up, including a cleaning Wedge which will be added in a later update!

Next up, adding colliders & enemies to Mt. Bloom, as well as prototyping a bunch of challenges you’ll be doing there! :)

This week, we’ve been finishing things up for another frontline update coming later this week! This means Teddy has been busy dealing with balancing, bug fixing and multiplayer support for said portion of the game, and Fred has made some final animations for the upcoming battle:

Vilya also needed to finish something for this update, and unfortunately for Master Ivy, her task was to create a ruined version of Master Ivy’s office:

Once she had completed that task, she went on to improve one of the old Mt:Bloom outskirts maps, adding some greenery and vines to it:

And speaking of Mt:Bloom Outskirts, we kind of need a map from where you can enter the actual mountain, right? So that was made as well:

Since creating WIP GIFs was pretty fun to do, here’s one featuring the creation of the above map as well:

This week we hope to finish things up with the boss battle so that we can update frontline, and Vilya will start getting the Mt:Bloom backgrounds ready for implementation! Soon, it’s time to explore it’s hidden cave systems.. :)

Okay, so it’s finally time to wrap up all this festival business! The patch should be live within the next couple of day (make sure to change your beta to frontline if you’re interested in helping us beta test this – more info on that can be found here), so we’re finally starting to move on doing other stuff. First up though, some last minute additions:

A fourth cutout has been added, so those 4 people parties can each try on a new look!

We’ve also added a photographer who takes a screenshot of everyone behind the cutouts, 5 seconds after you ask her to! Here’s her sprite (made by Fred), and portrait (made by Vilya):

The fishing mini-game has been added, and it’s hosted by none other than Haddock the fish salesman:

The mini-boss encounter has been rebalanced and improved, including the Queen Bee having her own epic summoning animation, for when she summons a couple of bee friends (scared of all the bees you’ll be fighting yet?)…!

And finally, some new facial expressions as well as a brand new portrait has been added:

And with that, the festival is officially wrapped up! *phew*

Now, on to the “moving on” part of this blog, in which Vilya adds another collector portrait to the time travel crowd and has been playing around with adding more greenery and flowers to Mt. Bloom:

….I guess that’s not really that much of having moved on, is it..? Oh well. NEXT WEEK, THOUGH! Next week, we’ll have moved on for sure! No more festival stuff, I, uh, promise! ……Right guys? Right?!

Yes, it’s another week of festival stuff! And most likely there will be at least one more before we’re completely done :)

Vilya has started working on the treasure cave, where the flashback cutscene involving your mother Charlotte and the dragon will take place:

The cave will be filled with gold and treasures of various kinds, and this here is only the WIP of the left part of it – in the end it’ll be twice as big!

We also decided (thanks to Owns suggestion on the forums), to add cutouts to the festival, which you can stand behind:

In the end our idea is that you’ll be able to ask Luke & Marino (whom you’re at the festival with) to stand behind them as well, and we’re currently looking into the possibility of having a cameraman who will create a screenshot for you after you press a button. Not 100% sure if that will work yet though, but we think it’d be pretty fun!

Other than that, a lot of new expressions have been made in order for the characters to express the right feeling(s), both in the flashback cutscene (young dad!) as well as in and around the festival:

More to come next week!

Finally, Fred has started working on another mini-boss battle that will take place near the festival in time, and I’m sure you’ve been missing these guys:

Excited yet? Hang in there for a bit longer, the festival is just around the corner! :3

Another week has gone past! We updated the Stable Beta on Steam a few days ago, so if you’re a Stable user now’s a good time to play again: plenty of quests and a few new systems has been added for you to play around with~

Now, what have we been up to this week? Our main concern has been Steam Leaderboards for Arcade Mode, which has kept both Vilya and Teddy busy in GUI-making-land:

Now, the highscores will be sorted in 2 different ways. First, how many players were present in the run, which means that single player, 2-player, 3-player and 4-player runs all will have their own highscore entries. You swap between these by pressing up or down (as indicated by the arrows next to the title).

Second, a filter option will let you browse through global scores, friends only, and your own highest score. You swap between these by pressing tab.

These leaderboards haven’t been implemented yet, but they should be in an upcoming patch! What was implemented, though, is the ability to hide your pet:

This function is something that has been on our to-do list for the longest while, and I’m sure a lot of you are happy to finally be able to hide pets that refuse to leave you alone! Go check it out by opening the Pet Menu from your Character tab.

Other than that, Vilya has been cleaning up and improving a few more things in different areas. Among the things she did was adding a bunch of decorations to the balcony in Startington:

As well as transforming this pretty empty area:

…Into something a bit more exciting, featuring decorative snow caves (yay?)!

Our goal with these snow caves was to have the yeti spawn from them, but we aren’t exactly sure if we’ll get around to that or if they’ll simply be decorative in the end.

Lastly, we’ll end the post with some cool animations by Fred, who keeps making gold charges! Here’s the Shadow Clone version:

As we’ve been developing this game, all of us have improved a lot. Today, both the graphical assets and the way we handle things programming wise are much different than they were when we first started out. Because of that, we thought it would be a good idea to have Vilya rework some of the early graphics so they’d fit in better with the later stuff! After all, we want any newcomers who purchase the game after it goes live on Steam Early Access to get the best first impression possible.

So, here are some things she’s been working on this week, in regards to that (most of these updates are actually already live and running in the Frontline beta, so go ahead and check them out):

First up – all houses in Startington have been updated as can be seen above! We’re gonna color correct them a bit in the next patch, making them slightly darker so they won’t pop as much against the background.

Almost all fences in the game have been or will be updated as well. These new ones are, like the houses, basically cleaned up versions with slightly different colors than their old counterparts.

Same goes for the wood! The old versions were kind of green and messy-looking, which has been corrected as of the latest patch.

The well also got a small correction: the wood is a bit cleaner and has been color corrected, and the bucket has been redesigned.

The suspension bridges have been updated as well: cleaner lines, fewer colors, less sickly green hues.

The bridge where the fisherman is had to be updated as well – it simply wasn’t safe for him to stand on such a moldy, worn down old thing with stray pixels everywhere! Now he can feel safe while awaiting his next catch.

As of the latest patch, there’s also a bunch of new items and two new character portraits to be found:

Meanwhile, Fred has been working on finishing up those last Gold Charge Spells! Here’s another one, the earth spike now turned into a giant hand:

Alright guys, Vilya here! Sorry for being a day late, it was my turn to write the blog post yesterday but honestly it was a really long day, and it totally slipped my mind. But hey! The good news is I spent the time working on Temple of Seasons rooms for Arcade Mode instead..! :D

In case you missed it, we’ve updated the frontline beta with multiplayer support for the Temple of Seasons! That means it’s time to dive into the dungeon with all your friends and hunt those bugs down!

Anyways, Fred has gone to Germany this week, where he’s busy making video reels with animations to show our beloved sound designers. So, instead of his fancy work you’ll have to make do with some of my desert WIPs:

A mysterious desert house!

WIP of a bridge.. :)

A couple more versions of the bridge!

Making a huge tree that’s been dead for quite some time!

…But now it’s coming back alive, thanks to you… If you complete a certain quest, that is ;)

WIP of the entry to the next area

The part with the house, all decorated and done!

The part with the town wall, all decorated and done. Beyond this point you’ll find a small town… But it’s kinda hard to get there with that bridge all broken, isn’t it? Guess you’ll have to fix it somehow, or find another way to get there..

I know a lot of you have been curious for stuff Teddy does as well, but this week, I wouldn’t ask for it if I were you! You see, it’s that time of the year where companies need to start handing in tax reports and annual records of what their company has been up to, so it’s all paper work and no fun! :(

However, he’s also getting started on implementing more floors for Arcade Mode, so we’ll get into that soon enough…!

Thanks for looking, and for the comments you leave every week! Hope you enjoy <3

Hello Collectors!

This week, Teddy has been focusing on the multiplayer aspect of the Temple of Seasons! We’ll patch the Frontline beta to include this in the next few days.

Bug hunters can rejoice in that multiplayer is, as always, the most error prone part, although from basic testing it seems stable. Which means in reality, when you guys get your hands on it, it probably won’t be stable at all! :D

It all works if you stand perfectly still!

Meanwhile, Fred has been whipping together the final animations required for the cutscenes at the end of the temple, and Vilya is making the desert area interesting with tons of props and details!

As you can see, we’re going for a rocky type of desert, with lots of ridges and set pieces! Apparently, people absolutely love deserts as it is, so hopefully ours won’t be an exception.

…but wait, what is this? Looks like Evergrind City but something’s different…

Last week, Teddy and Fred spent most of their time working on the Temple of Seasons boss. Vilya, in the meanwhile, jumped over to the next area – Mount Bloom – and started decorating a couple of the caves you’ll be exploring!

This is what the caves looked like before she started (as always, click any of these pictures to view a larger version):

And here’s a bunch of WIPs of the various decorations:

The result? Here they are, the caves with all the decorations:

She also had enough time to finish two cards, dropped by enemies in this area: