This Monday we’ve started discussing the last boss of this dungeon, which is one of the final things we need to add. As many of you have already guessed, and which might be quite obvious at this point, the opponent you’ll be facing is none other than your dear old friend Luke, and today we sat down to discuss what sort of feeling we want this battle to have.

For starters, we want the battle to take place on the ship, outside, and in the rain! This far we haven’t had any rain in Grindea, and it’s about time the weather changes. We also believe this will help set the tone for the fight. As for the actual fighting bit, we want Luke to use heavy attacks which will cause smoke and wood chips to spray from the surroundings.

Some of his attacks will be inspired by the two hand skill tree that is open to the player character, and he’ll combo others by mixing and matching them in different ways; meaning he might start with one attack which may have two different endings to keep you on your toes. He’ll also be starting some of this attacks by running towards the player, and we want the overall fight to be high paced with little rest; he won’t be idling around as much as Marino, for instance. Finally, towards the end, he’ll start using berserk mode to make things even harder for the player!

We’ve also discussed the last room we’ve yet to make for the Ghost Ship; a phase shift puzzle with ghastly features! Once this is made and implemented it’s only the boss and the final creepy Startington stuff remaining before the dungeon is completed – finally we can see the light at the end of the tunnel :)

The phase shift puzzle room will not only feature a phase shift puzzle featuring the ghost skill, but also another old friend from the past: Kailan, whom you last met in Tai Ming where he was showcasing the phase shift technology to the town’s inhabitants. Do you remember who he is? If not, you’ll get a reminder when I get around to making the ghost version of his portrait :)

Now it’s time for something slightly different; namely, creating a ghostlike thing that will block players paths here and there in the ghost ship! First up, a few different suggestions:

In the end, we decided to go for the ghastly substance, but were unsure about which color to use, so I made a couple different options (ending up with the original one after all):

And finally, making versions of the substance for the other door directions as well:

In its final form, this substance will be animated as well, giving it a bit more character and creepfactor!

The Startington interiors have long been outdated (they were, after all, among the first things I made), and what better opportunity is there to upgrade them than now that we’re looking into making a creepy version of Startington?

We’ll still keep the old versions of the graphics, but only use them for the ghost versions of these houses – we believe that their slightly shrunken, gnarly appearance will only help make the difference between the regular houses and the creepy houses more prominent.

Second house, same principle: touching everything up to the standard of graphics we use today:

And finally, the third and final revamped Startington interior:

In this week’s Monday Meeting we spent a great deal of time discussing the final challenge in the creepy version of Startington (among other things)! As you might remember from a previous meeting post ages ago, there will be three challenges in this surrealistic and spooky version of Startington: one where you fight a ton of slimes which gives you a card called Obsession, and one where you do some tough shield training and gain a wooden shield called Expectations.

In our latest iterations of the third challenge, we’ve been working around the theme of Deceit. In this latest iteration of the challenge, there will be a block puzzle in which you move blocks with each of the artifacts to designated squares (rather than a key block puzzle).

Mechanically we have a couple of ideas for how to make this more fitting the strange world; one is that instead of moving the blocks, the room will move, the other that as you attempt to move on block, another of the blocks will move instead. We’re not entirely sure which of these we’ll go for, or if we’ll do something else entirely, but we’ll start off with making prototypes of these two ideas first and see whichever one feels the most cool.

Next up, it’s time for us to “creepify” the interiors of the Startington houses! Our idea is that the player will enter each house in its original form and complete a challenge in there, after which the building will deteriorate and become dark and gloomy:

The second house creepified:

And same thing for the third house:

And we’ll end this week with a bunch of gifs from the second boss fight of the dungeon: the Evil Eye or the Twilight Beholder, that has finally been finished! This boss uses a lot of lasers and creepy eyes to try to eliminate you, so you better keep your wits about you :)

With the Ghost Ship drawer ever closer to completion, it’s finally time to start thinking about the future and the final dungeon! While we’ve had a bunch of loose ideas for it before, we felt it’s time to sit down and iron out exactly how we want it to be.

The number one thing we’ve always known we wanted is for it to be a tower of some sort. While we don’t feel the need for it to actually feel like a tower on the inside (we’d like it to have more rooms per floor than a typical tower would generally have), that’s the sort of general idea we’re going for: progression upwards (and the physical shape of a tower from the outside).

We also want each part of the rest of the game to be represented in this final dungeon, so it kind of feels like you progress through the game once more, with each floor being a distinct challenge inspired by the area it represents. As such, our goal is to have 9 different floors, one for each major area and dungeon, with the final boss residing on the 10th. These floors may still contain enemies and details from other areas than the one it represents, creating a sort of surrealistic feel to the whole thing.

We also want some sort of enemy that spawns bosses from previous places here and there throughout the dungeon, culminating in a boss rush containing several of the previously defeated bosses before you can finally reach the 10th floor and the last challenge of the game.

Our next mission will be to take some time and think about what sort of challenges would be nice to see on each of these floors, and puzzle them together into a great final dungeon. As always, if you have any ideas of what you’d like to see, feel free to share in a comment!

Next up, we’re taking a look at the lonely house in the top right corner, which you’ll eventually be able to reach through a bridge! Haven’t quite decided if we still want to keep the quest to build it or if we’ll just put it there one of these days and allow you to enter the house from the first time you enter town: we’ll see. Other than that, a fishing boat and some minor decorations to spice up the area :)

Next up in our Evergrind City improvements spree is the market area, where each of the market stands will get a little bit personality to make them stand out a bit more:

It’s been a while, but now it’s time for another boss portrait! This one featuring, unsurprisingly, the eye boss we’ve been working on for quite a while now!

Without further ado:

Meanwhile, Fred has started working on something slightly different; namely a set of new animations for a version of Dad you’ll run into in the creepy version of Startington you’ll find yourself very soon. What happened here?!

Next up in our improvement spree of the earlier areas is Evergrind City and the areas surrounding it!

We’ve previously talked about redesigning the city – and we might still get around to that at some point – but for now I’m confident any improvements I’ll make to it at this point will be able to be transferred over to any new design we might make, so I haven’t been too worried about that when thinking about what parts we can improve upon here.

Once more it’s mostly about adding more detail and making things look a bit more unique and detailed, with the exception of the entrance to the arena which I feel looks awfully outdated compared to a lot of the other graphics and will likely be remade completely:

So to kick off the Evergrind improvements, we’ll start off with the final (for now) piece of improvement in Evergrind East; the little fishing pond. We wanted to give this part a bit more detail, so we added a Grindea bust and some ruins to give it a bit of character, as well as some more of the greenery and a little path leading up to the pond:

Next up in our Evergrind Improvements spree comes the Arena, which is probably the one thing in Evergrind City that feels the most outdated in my opinion. In order to spice it up a bit we’ve done a complete new design, that stand out a bit more and is a bit more festive than the old one:

And now, some stuff around the entrance or library area of the town! New lampposts, a slightly fancier path leading up to the library, railing to protect people from falling into the stream, an improved library sign and some decorative mini-trees!

Meanwhile another update from the eye boss progress, featuring the WIPs of more attacks and animations slowly but steadily getting added:

Another week and more boss progress! There are so many things we could do with this boss that it’s difficult to choose which attacks and patterns we want to keep. One of the things we’ve done recently is working on tweaking one of the eye boss new attacks, featuring a barrage of eyes that will eventually explode! There are a bunch of sliders we can use to tweak this attack, and one of them is number of eyes:

..and also the shape of the explosion circles, below with a more circular shape:

The one above is probably closest to what we’re aiming for for now, but as with everything else this might be changed with more testing!

The latest iteration of the laser attack now also has proper lasers, and more eyes:

As you can see here, the trick is figuring out which eye colors are not present in the big eye, which will let you know which eyes won’t be firing the laser. To make this a little easier we’re also adding symbols to the eyes, making them easier to tell apart:

We haven’t decided exactly which of these symbols we’ll use yet, as we want to pick the ones that are the most clear from the side as well. Fred has already started playing around with what the eyes would look like from the side, but we’re not quite there just yet:

We know this boss (and the map in general) is taking ages to finish, but we’re determined to not let it go until each of us is fully satisfied with the fight, and we believe that once we’ve gotten to that point, it will all be worth it! Hopefully the third floor will be complete enough to run through and test very soon… :)

Meanwhile my work outside of the Ghost Ship continues with more improvements, and we’re slowly working out way down to Evergrind East; here’s a couple more of my sketches for more places we’ll improve upon:

And so we’ll start with the first two sketches, adding some more decorations first to the second Pillar Mountains map:

…and then we move to the area right before Evergrind City to spice up Evergrind East a little bit:

Next up, Evergrind City’s entrance itself, a slightly bigger job adding some decorations and making the wall more prominent:

We’ve already mentioned that during your stay in the Ghost Ship, you’ll be transported back to Startington, but things are not the way you remember them… One thing we’ll change in regards to this is your home, which will have a slightly different look… Or rather a few slightly different looks, of which the first one is a more idyllic version!

Take a look at the transformation here:

So, this Startington Home will have multiple versions, and it’s time to get going! First a reminder of the first version, and then each consecutively version as they will become available to you, culminating in a version where things have gone a bit… messy to say the least:

Going back to the overall Pillar Mountains improvements, it’s time to take a look at the area surrounding Mumrik’s tent! I felt this area felt a little bare, so decided to spice it up a bit with some more stuff:

Next up we’ll do something similar to the area surrounding the fisherman on the next map, and after that it’s time to continue scouting more areas to improve upon!

Without further ado: The fisherman’s area in lower Pillar Mountains! Getting some improvements, a little bit of everything:

In Fred’s animation department, we’re finishing up the eye boss..

…and moving on to more exciting things, namely the creepy things that will appear in that strange version of Startington that you’ll soon be visiting, starting with some slime that will cover the entirety of your character:

Another new week, which we’ll begin with some mixed fixes and additions! First up, a new version of the headless chef portrait, where his head has been replaced with… oh my… a tomato?

First of all we needed to decide which size this new tomato head would have, and to start off with we were unsure of whether we wanted a regular size or giant size tomato for the job – in the end we decided to go with the smaller one, and after playing around a bit with the sizing of the thing we got to this conclusion:

Now, how you get to put that tomato head on to a ghost’s body is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself!

Next up, a special type of door that will lead you in to the new Flying Fortress room I made last week:

We’re not yet sure exactly where this door will appear in the fortress, so for now I made the door in a random room – it will move to another location once we know where we want to put the room!

And so finally, some smaller additions to the Pillar Mountains improvements I did so far; more to come:

Now I thought we’d take a little look at how it’s going on with the Ghost Ship progress!

Teddy has been working hard to implement all of the stuff me and Fred made for him, which includes a bunch of cutscenes with the captain and some ghosts:

There’s the ghost ‘recruitment’ system, which allows you to present items to ghosts in order to bring back the memories of their past selves:

As well as that fancy eye boss, which has another attack featuring epic laser redirection:

There’s still a bunch of cutscenes and a bunch of puzzles to add, but the final floor is coming together slowly but surely. Soon we only have the final boss of the ship to deal with, which in itself will be an interesting but very exciting task…

Meanwhile in the portrait department it’s time for one more ghostlike portrait! While the Chef now has a portrait without his head and one with a tomato instead of his head, his actual head needs a portrait of its own, now doesn’t it? So, here we go:

Recognize this guy? Last time we saw him was in the past, in Tai Ming! But now he’s back in a slightly less… living state. Whatever happened to him? Soon it’ll be time for you to find out!

Finally this week, the boss progress continues and Fred has been busy making more and more attacks for giant eye you will be facing off against!

Now, for something we haven’t touched in a very very long time… The Flying Fortress! As part of the Ghost Ship update we want a certain people to.. come back from the dead, as it were, and in order to make them remember who they are it’s time to add a room in the Flying Fortress where they used to work, where you’ll be able to find something to remind them of their long forgotten past!

The character in question may or may not be one you have encountered before… Can you figure out whom?

Next up in the batch of portraits is the Bartender’s assistant, which is one of the ghosts that will play a part in the main story! Can you find them on the ship and bring them back to their work in the bar?

No bar or fancy dining place is complete without someone to keep everything and everyone in check, and so this ship’s bar has it’s very own bouncer whom you’ll need to bring back on duty as well! Looks like he’s kept on working out even after death…

We’ll do one more portrait this week, just to finish up the portraits needed for the time being! This time it’s the ghostly fae’s turn to get their portrait done, like so:

And now, time for something we haven’t done in a long time – a video! This one featuring a bunch of the drops you’ll find around the Ghost Ship:

New week and a new cabin redesign! This cabin belongs to a fashion designer from Tai Ming, who fled their home to start a new life in the Merchant Isles after the great cataclysm started by Zhamla:

After that, it’s time for a quick break from the Ghost Ship to make another one of the Pillar Mountains improvements! Because this cave will have some significance later on, we wanted its entrance to look a bit more fancy:

What you’ll find inside? Well… You’ll see!

For now it’s time for some more ghost like portraits, starting with the headless chef:

Quite an.. eh.. Interesting portrait, no? First time drawing a portrait without an actual head!

And next up, the bartender, who will have an important part to play in the players quest to get through this dungeon:

With the ghost ship ghost quest inclusion, it’s time to do something we haven’t done in a long time – add another interface!

In your quest to help the ghosts, you will need to bring items to them that will remind them of who they are. To do this, you’ll have to first speak with a confused ghost, bringing up an interface featuring all items you’re able to present to the ghosts (mainly misc and key items). Upon selecting an item, the ghost will then let you know if it’s what they’re looking for (which will clear up their confusion), or if it’s not.

We wanted this interface to be quite straight forward with lots of space for items so you don’t have to scroll too far looking for the item you want to give each ghost. We also wanted a box where you can view the item’s name before giving it.

Here’s my early sketch:

And the progress:

We’ll start off this new week with adding a slight puzzle or bonus thing to the corridor thing, featuring a pushable piece of staircase!

Our goal is to include a bunch of these optional things for the players to do while making their way through the ghost ship, as well as the side quests with the ghosts that we’ll be adding likely at a later date.

For now though, let’s take a look at how I move things around and create this rather simple puzzle thing:

As we come up with more of the ghosts that you’ll meet in the ghost ship, a couple of the rooms need to change a little to properly house them. This cabin for instance, which was left rather bland while we decided which ghost we wanted to stay in it, has now been turned into a singing diva ghost’s cabin:

And of course, with the addition of all of these ghosts, it’s time to start making portraits for them as well! Starting today with the pianist:

The next spirit portrait is that of an old lady! Sometime during the many years since the ship left harbour, she got separated from her husband. Will you be able to reunite them again?

In Fred’s animation department, there’s a bunch of more enemy details being worked on! The eerie painting can now spin around like a madma-… err madspirit, and there are some creepy eyeballs rolling around (ew):

For one of the puzzles there will be torches to light, and ghosts holding them up:

And also, a couple more friendly(ish) ghosts to live on the ship: