We’re drawing closer to the second patch of the Temple of Seasons testing. So close, in fact, we’re going to unleash it tomorrow, together with some fixes for bugs you guys hunted down in the past couple of weeks!

The patch will feature more progression (everything except the boss), drops for all the enemies, ability to get the actual cards, and also the proper music for the temple. Below are some of the drops you’ll going to find (the hats not included):

After this patch has been uploaded, we’ll turn all our attention towards finishing up the boss of the temple! Fred has already done a good chunk of animation work on him, and we think he’ll turn out great, but we’ll keep him out of this blog so that not everything is revealed!

Vilya, being done for now with everything she can do on the temple, has worked on things both from before and after Seasonne and the Temple of Seasons! For example, she made this Crystal Bug card (an enemy from Mt. Bloom), and also some slight style changes on a few characters in the very beginning of the game:

This week we’ve been working on two things: the main boss of the Temple of Seasons, as well as getting the first half of the temple ready for beta testing.

We want to keep the boss stuff hidden for now, but if you want a sneak-peek of what you’ll be facing, be sure to check Vilya’s blog in the coming days, as she’ll be uploading his boss portrait there.

In the meanwhile, here’s a bunch of expressions that Vilya has been making for the Temple of Seasons cutscenes:

She also finally got around to updating the library back in Evergrind City, which means you might eventually be able to go there as well:

One of the quirks that sets the Temple of Seasons apart from the rest of our dungeons is of course the Season Change ability we showcased a while back. While combat kind of takes a lead role, navigating through out the temple using the seasons will hopefully be a strong co-star!

Fred has been creating a bunch of different obstacles that block and open up different areas of the temple depending on the active season within the room.

This week has been all about cleaning up and finishing some of the different areas and encounters we’ve been working on these last few weeks.

The hydra battle is more or less only missing some final polish and a good dose of balancing and tweaking (something Vilya talks a bit more in depth about here) before we can call it done. We’ve learned over the course of the production though that the saying “The last 10% takes 90% of the time” rings true a lot of the time so we might not be at the finish line just yet, but we’re certainly getting there!

The past week have also been host for the Alumni Days! The Alumni days is a week of lectures and workshops by former students at the University of Gotland, our old school, all of which are working in the game industry in some way.

Teddy was invited to do a lecture and a panel, and all three of us were all invited to a fancy three course dinner as well as a party with both former and present students! We don’t tend to go out that much so we had a blast just talking games and design with other like minded people.

Besides all that, it’s been business as usual. Fred has kept working on animations for the temple while Vilya still is locked up tight in the portrait factory!

This week we have continued working on the various fights that will take place in the Temple of Seasons!

We’ve played around with mixing the different enemy types and started tweaking their combos where we felt they were too powerful or not powerful enough! Here’s a few short GIFs featuring the test sessions in single player, which allows you to see most of the special attacks of the different enemies:

Click any GIF to view a bigger, more crisp version!

We’re currently looking into balancing the autumn combo, which is a bit too OP at the moment: the movespeed of the autumn knight inside one of those whirlwinds makes it impossible to dodge and as you can see, it chases you for quite a long time!

We’re also talking about adding another enemy type that will only serve to change the season of a room during combat. As the enemies become stronger when in a room that matches their season, an obvious strategy would be to eliminate one season first, then change the room into that season – removing all empowered enemies in the process. To counter that, we want the season changing enemy to be difficult to kill – most likely from being fast and hard to hit. You’d have to decide if it’s worth chasing it down and try dodging the other enemies while doing so, or deal with more difficult enemies overall.

Other than that, Fred has been making a bunch of decorative animations, and Vilya has kept working on the portraits (not too many left now)! Here’s a bunch of those, plus another card:

With the core enemies of the dungeon reaching a pretty complete state, we’re moving on to the juicy stuff. Bosses!

The game up to this point has been relatively boss heavy, which is a trend we are aiming to keep going. Designing and creating all the different bosses has definitely been one of the highlights of the production. Hopefully you guys feel the same way about playing them!

The Temple of Season will feature two mini-bosses on top of the “real” Dungeon boss. As with prior bosses, keeping every fight different (but still fun and challenging) has been our main goal when designing them.

Fred spent parts of last week working on the sprites for one of the two mini-bosses, the Season Hydra.

The premise of the fight is that each head will grow stronger whenever it’s matched up with its season. Players will have the ability to change the seasons during the battle and will have to do so on a regular basis to avoid making one of the heads too powerful.

Vilya, on the other hand, has kept making portraits! Here’s a bunch of WIP’s, as well as their finished sprites:

Picking up from last week, the three different types of Wizards are now in the game and working properly. The Wizard is a ranged support type of enemy, with each variation having its own unique special ability. Just like their melee counter-parts, the Wizard can only use their special abilities if the current season matches its color.

Click to see the animated GIF!

We have tried our best to make each Knight/Wizard pair have a set of abilities that work in symbiosis with each other. As seen above the Summer Wizard can imprison players, making it harder to avoid the Knights heavy hitting special attack.

The winter Wizard can summon a Ice Shield around a target monster that will slow and damage players within close range. The shield can be destroyed by shielding, attacking or taking damage from it. Paired together with the agility of the winter Knight, it could turn into a deadly threat!

Last but not least the fall Wizard can summon a bunch of tornados that move around at a seemingly random pattern. Players getting too close will be sent flying into any nearby enemy. The tornados can also fuse with fall Knights performing their Spinning Attack, making them super charged in terms of speed and damage.

Vilya has kept on making portraits! Here’s some of her WIP’s from this week:

And here are the finished sprites:

Fred has been soldiering on with the temple’s basic enemies, finishing up the knights! As we’ve mentioned previously, they would share many similarities, but all have different special attacks they can use if the current season match their color.

The Autumn Knight spins his sword and chases after players
much like Giga Slime’s saw spin!

The Winter Knight dashes through the playfield
akin to the player’s own Piercing Dash-ability

The Summer Knight unleashes a powerful, uninterruptable smash,
breaking shields and dealing tons of damage

Next week we’ll be focusing on the different Season Wizard’s special abilities!

Since Vilya’s now reached a roadblock on the temple rooms (since the few left must be discussed in detail before she can make them), she’s returned to the portrait factory, remaking and revamping!

One of these portraits are the plushie collector in the city. We decided to make her a bit younger when we updated the portrait, as well!

Here’s how she used to look:

And here’s the step-by-step for the new portrait:

Talking about portraits, don’t forget that you can get more in-depth information of Vilya’s work over at her personal blog!

Fred is back in town, which means the animation machine is back up and running! We’re totally going to regret saying this, but we’ve got our aims set on updating the Frontline build before the end of the week.

The update will include a prototype of the Toy Factory mini-dungeon, as well as the Winterland enemies. Since we’ve focused on implemented the story parts, the area is pretty barren when it comes to quests and other stuff to do — that will come later, possibly even as late as with/around the Season Temple!

But this is all future talk. The Toy Factory isn’t quite completed yet, although Fred had dived straight back into making the animations Teddy needs to wrap it all up once they’re done:

 

 

Oh, and the Winterland-stuff isn’t the only thing in the update. Apart from some small changes and bug fixes, it’s going to contain a ton of updated portraits! Here are some more of them:

Lastly, Vilya is starting a work blog where she’ll post more stuff she’s making for the game and write about the production from her point of view. If you want to know more about how we work or simply enjoy following dev/artblogs, you should definitely head over there!

This week we’ll keep the post short! Fred is still away (he’ll be back later this week), so no animations yet. We do have a bunch of portraits though:

There’s still 30 portraits awaiting a remake, but that’s actually less than half! Phew!

Teddy is still fine-tuning the Toy Factory cutscenes, but once Fred is back it’s time for the final testing and polishing stage! If everything runs smoothly we just need a couple of additional animations from Fred before we can (finally) patch the factory into the beta for you to test.

Our next step will be to start sketching the layout and puzzles of the second temple. Stay tuned~

This post is a day late, because somehow we managed to forget that it was Monday yesterday and just kept working like it was any other day of the week… Gotta blame the crazy heat wave that’s been going on here, we Swedes can’t handle degrees over 25°C without going insane! ;)

Anyway! More Toy Factory this week. Most of it has been fleshed out by now – all that remains is polish and the boss fight, which Teddy is currently working on. Here’s a glimpse of another of the rooms, this one having a larger conveyor belt that provides a different type of obstacle for the player:

Vilya has been busy making additional expressions for some of the characters that will appear in the cutscenes, but she’s also had time to remake a bunch of old portraits to better suit the new style:

Fred is currently having well-earned summer vacation with his family and friends, so there will probably be an absence of animations to show off these coming weeks. We hope he has a great time and enjoys his time off instead (the weather sure couldn’t be better)!