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…

Things haven’t stood still just because there’s been Dreamhack Winter! We’ve been showing you a ton of in-progress gifs of the Season Hydra boss, but no boss is quite complete without a boss portrait, and so Vilya has come to the rescue:

The Temple of Seasons will feature no less than three boss battles, of which we’ve only really talked about one. Here’s the boss splash for another, which has already been mostly implemented:

We don’t want the regular enemies to be left hanging, though! As always, they get cards for the player to collect. Here’s the one for the Season Magicians:

While Vilya’s been at it creating these things, Fred has represented us over at Dreamhack Winter! Here we see a couple of innocent youths being corrupted by the grind:

And finally, here’s a shot of Fred secretly mind transferring a certain powerful Overpass boost to the members of Fnatic, which they would later be compelled to use in their match against LDLC:

This week Vilya has been bringing Teddy’s housing prototype to life, with both a GUI and proper graphics!

Our hopes for the housing system is to provide a little break, create a potential money sink, and give players some multiplayer bragging rights with their rare furniture!

(Boss spoiler alert) Fred has been churning out some graphics for the hydra faces as well. Here’s a gif from the currently very crude prototype, giving a little glimpse of how it’s going to work!

(Note: the gif is animated a bit slower than the real game for some reason)

As you can see from the gif, we’ve decided that all hydras should have the summer head, and also to use cleaner, more stylized backgrounds in white and gray!

All breath attacks will cause some lingering effect on the floor, making the battle more difficult. The winter head, as seen in the gif, will freeze the ground causing players to slip around. The summer head will leave a trail of fire, damaging anyone who walks through it (although unlike the ice blast, players can actually affect where the fire breath will land).

We haven’t decided how autumn will affect the playfield yet, but we’re thinking along the lines of mushrooms, which will pop and release blinding spores if you touch them.

We keep working on the Temple, which is coming alone nicely! Vilya has finished almost all rooms, except for a few which will house special challenges or (mini-) bosses that we need to design a bit more before creating their rooms.

Here’s the last few rooms she made before returning to portrait painting:

Some of these rooms will have animated obstacles and details added by Fred at a later stage, so stay tuned for that!

Teddy, in the meanwhile, has been working on prototyping some of the enemies that you’ll encounter in the temple. Here’s a screen of one such battle in action:

Back from Dreamhack and onto working, we’ve dived right back into the Temple of Seasons!

Vilya is closing in on finishing up all the rooms, so here’s a few of the more recent one she’s been making:

We felt we wanted to try out enemy compositions as soon as possible, so Fred has taken a break from transition animations and returned focus to the enemies!

Here’s a set of animations for the Autumn Wizard:

Just like with the Season Knight we posted a while back, the Season Wizards will come in three different varieties. Just like with the Knights, if the season of the room matches the wizard’s colors, it will gain a powerful special ability!

To combat the enemies of the temple effectively, you’ll have to pay close attention to the season of the enemies you’re fighting, and try to alter the environment to counter it. Sometimes, when you’re fighting enemies of mixed seasons, you’ll just have to pick your poison!

While waiting for the art assets, Teddy has also began tinkering on the housing part of the game! It’s unclear when this will be added to the game proper, but at least the foundation has been laid.

To compensate for all the good looking art, here’s a screenshot of a masterpiece created in-game with the super early prototype:

The Flowering Benches – Teddy van Brugh (2014)

This week we’ve kept on working with the Temple of Seasons, adding more rooms and more seasons! Here’s another GIF, from a room with multiple season orbs:

Click to see it animated!

As you can see, depending on what season it is, there will be different obstacles blocking different paths. Will you be able to find your way through the dungeon?! Only time will tell…

In the meanwhile, here’s one of the versions of the lobby, an important room that connects many different parts of the dungeon, that has kept Vilya busy for a while:

Click for full size!

Don’t forget that you can see more of her work (and additional rooms) over at her blog.

New for this week is also that Teddy has started up a tumblr where he will post GIFs of what he’s currently implementing. Go follow that for more animated goodies.

Oh, and you haven’t forgotten Fred’s old tumblr, have you? That’s the place where he posts what he’s working on.

If cold autumn winds are making you wish you could rewind time and go back to the warm embrace of summer, then our Temple of Seasons™ might be just the thing you’re looking for! Simply whack the supplied Summer Orb and watch the landscape transform around you:

It’s animated! Click it!

We had a long back and forth discussion regarding how the seasons would work in the temple, mostly related to whether the Season Orbs would change the season of the entire temple, or just the current room. In the end, we went with having the orbs control the season of their own room!

Both variants could lead to some interesting progression mechanics, but we went with this variant mostly since it would put a slightly less massive workload on poor Vilya and Fred, while also being a bit easier to create puzzle modules for.

For similar reasons, we opted to have separate orbs that summon their corresponding season, rather than one orb that cycled between them, as in A Link to the Past.

Having the entire dungeon sketched out, we feel it has a ton of potential to be really cool when it’s all done!

This week we’ve continued working on the Temple of Seasons. It will be one of the most graphically heavy areas of the game since both enemies and scenery will have three different variations, so our grahpic duo have wasted no time getting started!

Below is one of the early rooms of the temple in all of its autumny glory.

If you missed it a few weeks ago, Vilya have started up a workblog that goes a lot more indepth about the graphical assets she’s making, like the room seen above. Be sure to check it out!

Fred have spent the week finishing up all of the animations for the Summer varation of the Knight enemies we showed off a while ago. The Summer Knight will work as a base for both the Fall and Winter versions. Besides different weapons, each enemy will have their own set of unique moves they will have access to if the area is set to their season.

Above is the Summer Knights special move, a high damaging single target attack with Guard Crush (instantly destroys your shield if not perfect guarded) and a huge knockback.

Besides fancy special attack, the knights will be the first enemy in the game that uses shields. The enemy shields will work similar to player shields in terms that they have their own HP and can break if taking too much damage.