It’s been a whole week already. Time to update you!

The featured image is a photo of to do lists for Tobi and Stamm. I was told to emphasize, that “golden” tasks are Tobi’s. Because he is our golden boy, I guess…
I don’t know. Whatever the circumstances, the lists have been cleared pretty well, and work is getting done. I am proud of the guys.

Tobi cannot let Stamm take over the gif domain and has sent me a gif galore, if you will. He has updated the NPCs to better reflect Elvis’ look. First they had two-part bodies, consisting of a pyramid head and a torso. During development, Elvis’ model and animation was revamped, so the Spike People around him seemed a little off. After the update, they are looking spiffy and more Elvis-like, since they are from the same people. Here goes:

Spike A

You can see, their body is only made up of the pyramid, directly transitioning into the leg component.  No more separate torso.

Spike B

Tobi has spent his last week, modelling and rigging the Spike People. That means, he inserted a “skeleton”, getting the characters ready for animation.

Spike C

For the next step, Stamm will take the characters and wrap textures around them, a process that can be seen a few blog entries earlier.

Spike D

When I received the models, I was a little sad that none of them had names. They don’t seem to get any at this point. So if you have any suggestions, let me know. Maybe I can convince Tobi to name them.

If your head isn’t spinning from all the rotating Spikes, we can move on to Stamm.

At this point I will tease that Tobi and Stamm did not only work on On Rusty Trails for the last week, but were on a covert mission to produce some top secret assets. A reveal will hopefully follow in June, if this goes anywhere.

So for actual On Rusty Trails work, Stamm sent me some level insights. The first one is an overview over a scene in the Mixed area between Spike and Hairy. We switch from a birds-eye-ish perspective to the in-game frontal point of view.

Scene Turn

The next one shows, how sometimes stuff does not go the way we had planned. For compositional reasons a level did not fit in the area it was in, so Stamm did a little clicking around and poof, the house switches colors and the level can be placed at a better position.

Level Switch

Lastly we can see a “flythrough” of a Suburb level from the starting point to the first savepoint. On the right we can see the start as a static screenshot and on the left we are moving towards the savepoint.

Flythrough

That’s it for this update. We wanted to share one more thing: This week a crazy but cool Youtuber called jacksepticeye, did a Let’s Play of Tiny & Big. We liked it, so we did not want to keep it from you. Funny guy. Enjoy!

Adios, have a great weekend and see you next week!