#development log

I slowed down on trying to figure out his design a bit after that and instead focused on how his sprite would look. He is a merman after all, he can't just stand straight like a lot of the other visual novel characters. This stage was PAINFUL.

These were the first ones I sketched, we ended up deciding we liked the 3rd one the best.

I carried that 3rd one over to another canvas and started playing around with how we could place his tail, we started entertaining the idea of having him sit on a big rock

This is when his pose really shaped up. The animated Little Mermaid movie was actually a big inspiration, I sat and rewatched the entire movie and studied how they animated her tail

And after that I finally finalized his design. We decided to change the end of his tail to be more eel like for aesthetic purposes (normal tail shape looked weird with tongues)

And for anyone wondering this is what Maelyn looked like at first. Since the story wasn't complete yet I thought it'd take place in a more modern setting and designed her with that in mind but we decided to have the story take place in 1800s so I changed the design based on that. I did a lot of research on glasses and corsets to make the design as accurate as I could.

Yes glasses! We didn't use the sprites in the main story but Maelyn does wear glasses and looks very pretty in them if you ask me. You will be seeing more of it in the bonus episodes!

On a lesser notee, we had an idea for a different future update conceptt, howeverr, due to the troubles it's brought us on adding it in developmentt, it's highly likely scrapped unless we can get more people to help with adding itt (which is a shame 'cause this idea is really cooll)

This was an idea we had floating around about improving the battle systemm, making it half be a tactical RPG and half be the current battle system it is nowww (These two draws are simply mockupss, concept art if you willl)

Cold As Ice

Towards the end of last month I started designing the 4th region, where things are a bit colder. 

At the start of this month I finished up that area, spending some time to make the snow look pretty, or add some details like the player breathing or skating around on the ice. 

I then decided the colors and plants for the 'dream' version, I wanted to keep the more turqoise color and boost the saturation, and then make the ice more of a lilac color to match the dream "white" i use a lot already.

The main mechanics of this area (apart from yeeting around on the ice) is using heaters and coolers - heaters so you can melt frozen paths or objects (or frogs), and coolers so you can create new ice.

As you might have noticed in the screenshots above, the deeper water has ice too, which normally isn't passable by the player. By freezing the deeper water you can then cross over to areas you couldn't access before and find all sorts of places and secrets!

There'll be a few puzzles to work out using the heaters/coolers, but they also affect the nearby environment, allowing you to make the extreme ends of temperature for your mushrooms to find some new species.

This means I can 'gate' off a few types of mushrooms and trait modifications until you've come to this region and gained access to the machines.

I also wanted a way to let the player turn on/off weather, as it does have some uses and although you can sleep until the next day for a different weather pattern, I like to give players full control over stuff like that as they progress.

It also fits within the theme of the region, which is very much like a sort of 'climate control' type area - plus the idea of changing weather fits with the existing climate control machines. I tried to design the machines to be similar, but still have their own unique style.

I finished up some other bits and bobs and then that area was good to go! Now it was time to move onto what I thought would be the last area...

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Central Hub

After getting past the 'tutorial' region of the Spawning Pools, you end up in a large central area that leads to all other areas, and it's where your main goal of the game is that you have to come back to. I wanted this one to be more unique and stand out to the other areas, and seem much more important (because it is!), so I went with a more purple palette to emulate some feelings of it being more 'connected' with the dream world.

I've tried to make all regions have some unique characteristics but I wanted some extra stuff with this region, hence the large purple lilypads and special pink trees, and the light pink pollen falling over the area. This is also the area that will have the large central 'temple', that is a giant version of the smaller gates you use in the game - will take me a while to finish drawing it, I reckon it'll probably still be one of the last things I'm tinkering with right down to release...

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Yet Another Region

I thought I was done at this point with adding regions and was relieved as there's a lot of setup involved in getting everything in and working - there is a 6th area but it felt like an extension of the central region at the time so I thought I'd use the same region style. However at the same time of doing all this I was also working on designing the full map for the game, and realised that this area would actually be a bit bigger than I thought initially, and also connects with the starting area so I wanted to make sure it had a different style to make it clearer that its not just part of the central area.

This region has a lot of different research labs, and is focused more in the dream area with lots of 'dream' research being done - there's a few different machines for this area but I don't want to spoil them too much so I'll just show their designs instead.

There's also quite a few big important lore things here, so you can't actually access it right away and instead have to come back later when you've progressed enough. With this region done I did some last little tests with each of the regions to make sure I was happy with how they looked - this is how my "developer" map looked by the end of it:

With that done I was about halfway through the month - now it was time for the biggest task of the entire game's development, actually designing the full world map.

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​Game Cartography

Trying to start tackling this was definitely one of the harder parts of making this game for me - I had all the pieces, the mechanics were all done, I knew roughly what each area would have and do, but trying to put that alltogether in a giant interconnected world is very daunting. I decided to do this all on paper first so it'd be quicker to iterate, starting with really rough sketches of each region and the things that should be there guiding me on what the structure should roughly be like.

I then taped together a bunch of grid paper so I could have one 'main' map rather than keep swapping between what was already like 7-8 sheets of sketches, and started to pencil out the first couple regions together.

After sketching I then started to color in the areas, which was some nice screenbreak time but also let me think more about the regions and how the player would progress through them all.

As a final step I then went over the area with a pen to mark some key stuff - where lilypad crossings would be, gates, doors to rooms etc. I could then use this later for mapping the actual content or paths.

I didn't really need to color in all the darker water for most regions, but tbh it was just fun to do and baby ellraiser used to draw custom rayman 1 overworld maps when they were young so who am I to deny my inner child!

​It took me about 8 days but eventially I had the final map! Technically it's still not the final map as there's a couple areas I didn't want to put on the map for spoiler reasons and I knew I'd be taking photos of it and posting it around. However its good enough to keep me on the right track and remind me of what goes where - I'm also really happy with some of the routing of the areas, I think it should be really fun to explore and unlock and backtrack!

​With that done I could start plugging it into Tiled - I tried to not be too strict with blocking out the areas, at first I was doing like exact square by square, at great eye-straining cost, but then I realised really I just needed to make sure the regions were roughly where I expected them to be and got a bit more loose with some island shapes. Just this blocking stage along took some time, as I was first just blocking in the islands and water, then I was going and doing the 'proper' tiles, then the stone tiles and the grass/mud on top - this was so I could stop having to keep looking at the bigger map all the time.

Blocking out all the other regions took me all the way to pretty much the end of the month, on paper (lol) it doesnt sound like much to have a 500x400 map, but after actually drawing it all I can say it really is!

With all that done there was still lots to be done - for each region I need to add all the stone + grass "decor" (cracks, bricks, grass patches, posters etc). Then I need to add the actual flora objects to the islands (grass, shrubs, trees), then add all the water plants for both the shallow and deeper areas, add all the world decoration, and then block out all the rooms! Then I need to do the collision layers for the bottom and top floors...

It took me about 2-3 days to go from the blocked out version of the first area, to a 'finished' area (that still needs a few last bits added to it) - to give an idea on the scale, there's about 15,000 objects in the screenshot below, including all the plants and grass and decoration, all placed by hand. I'm not going to do every single decoration and scenery piece for every other region right now, as thats something that can be done later - the main thing is making sure it all fits together and is walkable and all the doors lead to the right places.

Adding all the extra decoration and scenery is something I can do quickly at the end while doing playtesting/qa/localisation, so I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I wanted to get at least the first area fully finished off so that it's clear what each area will look like when finished up!

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