World Building

This week has been a good one for Arnthak. Content wise, there's been some significant mapwork additions, as well as a changes to some interactions. Jay has sent on some new sprites, which are an excellent update of the old Slug sprites.

Map Work

I've been working on the tunnels that lie between the Under-tower mines, and the Ice Caverns, in an extension of the work from last week. Here's the progress sheet so far:

There's also been a few tweaks along the way, as well as two new map chunks of forest (unfortunately, the forest sections always take a while to work through).

For the cavern sections, I've decided to add a drop-section to help add a bit of pressure. This is similar to the flying-carpet sections of the Aladdin game, and the mine cart sequence of Captain Comic 2. This drop will be about 5 screens long.

(Click to enlarge)

Spritework & Art

Jay's reworked the original Slug sprites that were done by Pixelcade to suit the style that we're slowly bringing through into the final game. Here's how they look now (double scaled):

Jay and I have also been discussing the visual style of the Rival Mage's technology, and Tower. It's an interesting type of discussion, as Jay brings some great ideas to the table. I'm confident we'll have a really awesome looking set of sprites for those areas.

Items

Not too much new work on this front. Since I've been focussing more on other things, but I did manage to implement a new Jarred fish - players can now catch Purple Seahorses and release them in other bodies of water.

Engine

Tarvos got a few interesting changes - I managed to implement loot explosions (when the player hits a 'secured' crate, its contents will spray around), as well as shifting a few Tower upgrades to be controlled via Crube instead of the individual items themselves. The player can now change their throne & suits of armour via Crube, and these menus are dynamically added according to what models you have added to the pool. This will help make things easier with more additions.
Here's a quick screenshot of the loot explosion: