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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next week!

Beta Info

Big thanks to all the people taking part in the beta! An extra shout out to all the guys and gals who took the time to write up feedback for us. It means a ton to us and will really help us make the game as good as it can be.

To all of you who have signed up for the beta but haven’t got the chance to play it yet, hang in there! We will be sending out a batch of new invites when we are ready with a new update for the game. We are working hard on some new features that are in the need of testing, hopefully it will be worth the wait!

Production

As for the production this week, we have done some changes to the Collectors Exam the players must pass during the early parts of the game in order to become a Collector. For those of you who doesn’t know, the exam is divided into a three part trial. Initially the three parts were treasure hunting, puzzling as well as a juicy combat part.

After some feedback and a lot of talking and discussion within the team we decided to change the treasure hunting into a fishing event instead. The main reason for the change was that the fishing system is used much more frequently through out the game, so it made more sense making it a part of the trials. It also streamlined the introduction of the fishing much more for us, something that we have been having headaches over for a while.

The fishing even in action!

Besides reworking and touching up old things, we have made some new progress.  We have started working on a new boss! Two actually, as they are a pair of demon twins. They are an optional encounter, but we are putting just as much love and care into them as the main bosses.

We’ll not dive into detail into the mechanics of how they work since they are still in the prototype stage, so you’ll have to do with some eye candy and the promise of fierce boss battle once it all comes together.

From early design sketches to finished sprites!

And some freshly baked animations!