Devlog feb 27th - Villain introduction

 Welcome to the second devlog of February

Last time we said we'd continue work on the forest village. However, there have been a change of plans. We forgot that we intended to add a cutscene that introduces the main villains of the game: A Jotun (giant from norse mythology) called Hraevelgr and an as yet unnamed Jotun hag.
After finishing the work on the farm from last time, we started work on this new cutscene.

Here we see Hraesvelgr and the hag with some captives.

We have drawn their sprites and also their dialogue portraits:

Hraesvelgr is the military leader of the goblins

The hag has mystical knowledge and abilities

We of course also had to craw this area, which the player won't visit for a little while.

We want to put a face to the villains relatively early on and give the player an idea of what they are up against.

This is the first time we have a cutscene where the player isn't present. Normally the camera follows the player character, so this required a little bit of extra work for us. We can now change which character the camera follows dynamically. In the above cutscene, the camera follows an invisible character, allowing us to control the camera. There are some downsides to this approach, but it's good enough for now. At the end of any cutscene, the camera resets and once again follows the player character.

As a side note, we also drew some walking animations for two of the captives so we can show them arriving in the cutscene.

These two have similar colour schemes because they came from the same farm.

Thanks for reading!

Next update is on March 13th and this time we will work on the forest village.

Talk to you then!