Yes, it’s finally time to replace that old video on the front page with a real trailer, freshly made for the SGA and GGC!
As we’re in the middle of the last-minute crunchtime we’ll keep it short this time:
Now, time to get back to our attempts at making everything look and work as great as possible for the coming events! Wish us luck :)
This week we spent writing the major cutscenes that will be found in the beginning of the game. These things might change slightly as the game evolves, but should still tell the story properly.
Vilya also created the inside of the headquarters from last week:
For now there are only three doors, but after the beta we plan on adding special rooms that will unlock as you progress on your adventure and gain rank within The Collectors Guild.
Fred spent the time making some more NPCs, ready to move into the soon bustling city.
We plan on making all our NPCs (save for the guards) special in some way, and in the end most of them should have at least one quest related to them. We’re doing our best to make sure it’s not just a bunch of the traditional “go kill 10 slimes” and try to come up with different types of activities for your character to participate in, but for the beta we might keep it simple to give people a chance to get familiar with the basic systems.
Other than that, we decided to spice up the spell casting graphics a little, adding this effect when releasing a charged spell:
The color will vary slightly depending on what type of spell it is.
We welcome you this week to the headquarter of The Collectors! This is the place where you’ll get a lot of your quests, and the most important ones at that. But of course, you have to earn your right to actually visit this place by completing a difficult trial first. Will you succeed? I guess we’ll see…
This week some people finally moved into the city of Evergrind as well! Here you can see them, minding their own business while waiting for their neighbors to settle :)
Last but not least, here’s a banner you’ll be able to see, should you visit Visby in 2½ weeks. Our school is arranging GGC, a small game conference on the island of Gotland and we’ll be there showing off our game live for the first time to the public! We’re very excited to see how people respond after playing it, and as you might guess we’ll be going into beta shortly after that weekend!
This week we have spent a lot of time on interface stuff, mainly the skill distribution interface and the shop screen! As they’re not fully implemented you’ll have to wait a bit longer to see how it works, but we promise a video of it in it’s full glory(?) once we’re done!
To move on to more interesting things, Vilya has spent some time of the week doing this abandoned temple that will be a main dungeon in the game!
Unfortunately we won’t show any more than the entrance for a while, as we still need to backtrack to get the beta ready & polished, but to make up for it we have a few animations from Fred:
This is a powered up version of the move you saw last week: Blade Flurry. By holding the button for longer, you get that high damaging final strike.
And here’s the equivalent for the two handed overhead attack. If you just press the skill button, you’ll just get one hit off, but if you hold it, you’ll get an additional slash during the startup. This will both yield more damage, and make it easier to land.
This week, there’s been a ton of skill work done, and of course the thousand year battle of the GUI rages on. Menus aren’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world to show, and they aren’t even fully implemented yet, so this week we’ll treat you with two animated screencap gifs of the new skills!
This here spell is our first summon spell! It will summon a lightning cloud which hovers around, doubling as damage dealer and moral support (dat smile)! This is the first level of the skill. Later levels include features like targeting flying enemies, more damage, faster attack speed and less glee.
While it’s not set in stone, we’re toying with the thought of having summons be permanent (until you dismiss them). Instead of costing mana as you cast them, they would “block out” a part of your mana bar. That is, if you summon something which costs 30 % of your mana, for as long as you have that summon in play, those 30 % will not regenerate!
The gif above showcases one of our one handed weapon skills: Blade Flurry*!
It’s basically a series of very fast hitting strikes right in front of the character. It’s superb for exploiting openings in duels, like versus this lone Halloweed. It also has a very quick charge speed to offset its limited area of effect. The speed and duration of the move changes as you charge it, and later levels will have a fierce finishing strike to add even more damage!
For those of you yearning for another video… stay tuned! Some day, when the planets are aligned, it’ll appear!
*Working name :DThis week we have worked on many different areas of the game! We’re currently trying to tie everything together for our long-awaited beta (sorry about that!), so chances are the coming updates will keep on being little bit all over the place.
What we can show you from the skill area are these two skills, animated by Fred:
This is the Earth Spike spell! This is part of an experiment we’re having with targeted spells.
As you charge the spell, you will gain control of a small target circle, and when you release the button the spell will be cast at that location. The circle has a limited range, and cannot pass through walls (although it can pass through small obstacles like trees or rocks).
We wanted to at least try it out, since we felt a new type of spell casting would be awesome for the game’s variety. It actually works pretty well! The challenge comes with trying to balance out the high accuracy.
The new charging system is also shown in the gif! Being a ranged spell with high mobility, the charge time of Earth Spike is pretty high. Level 1 and 2 looks the same, but level 2 will knock enemies up and stun them, opening them up for attack or giving the player time to reposition. Level 3 upgrades all aspects, with more damage, larger area of effect and longer stun. Notice how the rabbit is easily comboed with the mace due to the knockup and stun! Be careful, though, because heavy enemies can’t be knocked up.
This second spell is a typical Speed Up spell, which will increase your attack- and cast speed for a limited time. Great for when you’re in a hurry!
Other than spells we also worked on a feature that I don’t think has been mentioned yet: Cards!
Every enemy you kill will have a low chance of dropping a card like the one above. These cards will each give you a slight passive boost, which means collecting them all would improve your character by quite a bit!
They will also feature a portrait of the enemy that dropped it (pictured above is, as you might have guessed, the Green Slime Card) and will be viewable from the Card Album menu at any time.
Lastly, we have some fresh new portraits added this week:
Not much to say there. :) See you next week!
We all like flashy things, and there is no better way to start off a fancy boss fight than with a fancy introduction! This week, one of the things we’ve worked on is this flash screen, which will introduce your enemy every time shit is about to hit the fan:
As you can see (if you remember our old post) we have reworked the look of this scary boss! This also includes new portraits:
We’ve also been messing around with the idea of changing up how skills work, and after some time in the design dungeon, we’ve decided to give it a shot.
Most skills will now be able to be charged into flashier and more powerful versions by holding down the button. The charge time differs between spells depending on how limiting this extra delay would be for its usability, as well as how powerful the upgrades are. Our main reason for this change is to give players greater variety and involvement in the combat.
Initially, only two charge levels are available, but as you add points in a skill you unlock more charge tiers. Most offensive skills will have five of them!
Below are the animations and effects for the fireball charge, as well as the projectile sprite for level 1-2, 3 and 4:
The fifth level is not yet done, but we promise to crank the fanciness up to max for all top level spells!
Next week: More spells, portraits and… cards!
While much of last week was spent working on the project report for school, we’ve still managed to squeeze out some more stuff for the game! The inside of Evergrind City is continuing to take shape. Here’s a couple of the buildings Vilya furnished last week:
Above is the Hat Store! Here, you’ll be able to purchase and craft some sweet, sweet headgear! Headgear which you can show off to people online in order to impress friends, seduce the man or woman of your dreams, or to nail that job interview!
The slightly messy abode of a slightly messed up Alchemist! He might be crazy, but he’s a good guy. Not to mention he’ll be your go-to guy for stuff like potions!
Fred on the other hand have had a hard time leaving the Halloween Forest without a proper goodbye, so he stuck around for another week. Besides finishing up the last reaming bits of the Halloweed, he also did a cute little death animation for the Jumpkin!
Next Week: Reworking how the skills work and look, some more buildings, and… GUI :(
So the time is closing in for us to say farewell to the Halloween forest. Although it has been a lot of fun to do something new and exciting, all the props have been made and now only detail work (like actually putting it all together in the game) remains. Last week was spent mostly on that note on the programming and animation side and will probably continue on like that during this one.
While we’re shifting our main focus from the Halloween Forest in order to connect it to the rest of the game, we’ll try to set some time aside to record a gameplay video of us fighting inside it some time in the coming weeks!
Vilya’s final stretch in the forest was to make these portraits:
These are the NPCs you will encounter along the forest! Who they are? Remains for you to find out!
What we’ll do after this (and which Vilya has already gotten into, as you will soon see) is to return to the city of Evergrind, filling it with indoor designs and people. We’re also gonna look into adding more skills and expand our menu and level system in the near future, so look forward to that in the coming weeks!
Before that, however, here’s a sneak peek of two buildings that will be featured in Evergrind:
This is the Dojo, a place ruled by a great master of all fighting styles. Perhaps he can show you a new trick or two?
Another way to learn different types of tricks is to attend school:
Here you can learn details about monster types and other helpful hints and strategies that will make your grinding life easier.
Next Week: More indoory stuff for Evergrind, and tying up som loose ends of our good foresty friend
This week, we’re taking shelter from the spooky forest inside some buildings! Vilya has been busy creating the cozy, candy filled house of the witch, as well as a substantially less picturesque abandoned house…
Click on the screens for enlarged versions!
Fred has mainly been busy with cleaning up all of the basic attack animations for all of the enemies. Here’s a sample of this week’s workload in form of everyone’s favorite flying pumpkin wizard, the Jack O’ Lantern:
We’ve also been working on getting some lighting going to boost the atmosphere in the forest, and after some sweet feedback from Reddit, this is what it looks like at the moment (click it!):
If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to make a noise in the comments! :)
Next Week: Hurr durr ‘loween
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