It’s a new week, and if you’ve opted into the Frontline Beta, a new update! It’s finally time for you to try out a bunch of the additional content surrounding the ghost ship and good old Tai Ming! If you haven’t done so yet, go try it all out and let us know what you think :)

In the coming month we hope to have added the last bits needed as well as all of the sound effect and getting it all up and running on stable as well.

In the meanwhile, have a look at some of the stuff you now get to see in this update:

As you may have guessed from the new Flying Fortress building and what I wrote before, there is another phase shift challenge coming up! This one can give you a total of three different rewards, each one more challenging to get than the next. And naturally, it needs a background as well:

In this next step we’re adding a bit of detail to the phase shift course, creating a new block for it, and a shop title for the creepy ghost ship shop!

Next up, another ghost! This painter has been painting for a thousand years. Poor guy!

Drawing ever closer to finishing up the patch, there are still a bunch of expressions needed for our new ghost friends! Here’s another batch of them:

And finally, a bunch of animations from the animation department, featuring ghosts and new weapons available in the patch right now:

This week we’ll start with a bonus building added to the flying fortress! This building will replace the island on the right part of the fortress and will, though a quest unlocked after the ghost ship, give you an opportunity to do some more phase shifting (yay)!

Later on I’ll show you what the progress of creating the insides looks like… :)

But first, something about a long awaited addition! We know a lot of you have been asking for an easy way to change the controls, whether you use a keyboard or a controller. We’ve already implemented the mechanics for changing the controls on a keyboard, and while we want to add the feature for the controller as well, for now it’ll remain a WIP.

However, if you do have a controller plugged in, you’ll soon be able to see what each of the buttons do, with the help of this new graphic:

Without further ado:

To make it a bit more readable, we decided to move the second set of buttons behind the first ones, since that’s how it looks on most controllers – even if this makes the design of the controller graphics itself look a bit less nice. Also added the spaces where the function of each of the buttons will be described:

Next up, another character that will return in a ghostly form! Remember this collector from Tai Ming? She’ll return and feature a little side quest/secret of her own:

This old priest makes an appearance as well, drawn back to the haunting village of Tai Ming after his death:

Brandy will play a pretty big part in a quest/secret as well, are you looking forward to seeing him again?

Let’s start off the week with a mixed bag of random fixes and additions! First up, adding the door to Pine’s office into the Flying Fortress:

Second, changing the ghost fae from winter to spring:

Third, breaking the mirror in the singer’s cabin:

Next up, making some improvements and additions to the library which is finally getting put into the game:

And finally, adding some moss to the fallen mast in the battle area on top of the ship:

And now it’s time for a whole on of drop appearance sprites for all of those housing items I made last week! To showcase these, here’s a video featuring the making of them:

Now, with the ghost ship quest coming together, it’s time to make a bunch of expressions for the ghosts you’ll meet (and hopefully help!) there:

Quite a bunch of friendly faces! Will you manage to figure out how to help them all?

Two new portraits are needed for this patch as well, and the first features a headless skeleton, with and without an added head:

And the second portrait features Mirar, a sad NPC in Evergrind City who has a hard time keeping himself optimistic about things:

Now it’s time to start building what will be the final dungeon of the game! Wohoo! Starting us off, let’s begin with some exterior (gotta enter the dungeon somehow, right?).

In this first part, I’ll get the basics down, and some of the decoration; to be fixed and expanded upon in the next:

And here in the second part we’ll improve on the perspective a little bit, add some more details, and a top for the tower! Each floor can be seamlessly put on top of another, so when the tower appears (it’ll come up out of the ground) we’ll stack the floors on top of each other to make the tower seem super tall!

Can’t forget those furniture pieces! With you reaching the ghost ship it’s time to unlock a bunch of furniture stuff for the housing system, so here’s the first batch of basic stuff (more to come!):

In part two we move on from the basic stuff such as beds and wallpapers to more random, specific stuff and decorations! How about having a cannon in your house? Who wouldn’t want that! All of these items appear somewhere in the ghost ship and have been modified in size and/or color to fit the housing system:

Still some portraits to make though, and here we have one featuring a ‘doctor’.. Of a sort! As you can tell from his ghastly shape, he’s one of the poor restless souls and can found in the Ghost Ship: