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Hello ladies and gentlemen, how are you today?

Today, we're finally going to do the devlog that I had planned for Halloween ... Yes I know, 21 days late, but better late than never, right? Today, therefore, we are going to discover the recent improvements of the 3rd world of HopDrop, the Noirode Mansion... And more specifically on the building which gives its name to this world ... Well, you already know.

The context.

The Noirode Mansion is a haunted mansion, planned from the dawn of the game HopDrop in September 2015. This world started at the end of September 2016 was released with the version v0.3.0 of HopDrop, released on March 27, 2017, at the time when I was still present on the French-speaking RPG Maker communities. This world is therefore playable in the version v0.6.0 that you can download and play it ... But although this world has changed a lot, its heart, the mansion itself, has remained almost intact and therefore has aged poorly. That's why I almost completely redone it, here is its process of recreation.

Here is its old form, the one that still appears in the current version v0.6.0, with its plan next to it:

The stars represent the different passages between the rooms, and the whole only fits on a ground floor and a floor, knowing that I do not count the cellar which is apart. Even if the whole is based on a certain logic, in terms of arrangement of the rooms, it is rather the shape of its last, and therefore that of the manor, which poses problem. You could just say that this mansion is a big cube with no flavor or personality. The formula works, but it's too simple to be loved and remembered.

The new design.

This is how the quest for a new design for the Noirode Mansion begins. I like to say that to have a good imagination, you must not leave without anything or a foundation. As an anecdote, when the British studio Rareware designed the chapel for its Mad Monster Mansion, Banjo-Kazooie's 7th world, they didn't start from scratch, they were largely inspired by the church of Twycross, town where the studio is located. To redesign the Noirode Mansion, I started with the same idea: to be inspired by a building near my home.

I am lucky to live in a small medieval town in the center of Lorraine, in the North East of France, so I am not left out for potential sources of inspiration. So I took the base of this house, a few tens of meters next to the medieval city.

This house has a lot of charm, and large enough to be compared to a mansion. This is why I was inspired by it and made a concept art and a plan of the interior of the mansion. As I foreshadowed in last week's devlog, various preparations were made before make a new version of the mansion.

Although on the concept art on the left there is only one part of the building (quite close to the 2016 design, therefore), the final mansion has an extension on its right, which is shown on the plan on the right. There is no fireplace either, and although the plan indicates a fourth floor, all of the rooms are divided into 3 floors.

The completion.

Once we know what to start on, that the theory is set, it's great, we can move on to practice. I already had a lot of graphic bases, mainly walls and roofs. However, I made new windows and created borders for the walls. One day we will have the opportunity to talk about making the graphics for HopDrop. I invite you to see, without further ado, what the final rendering of Noirode Mansion looks like.

The result is a greater mansion, more pleasant to walk through and more consistent in the layout of its rooms. The rooms have also been redone, but I would devote another devlog to the screenshots of the game, I don't want to overload the content of this devlog. The work on improving this world is not finished, I intend to improve its 2 mini-bosses and rework its boss. Others of the 5 other worlds present in HopDrop will also benefit from this kind of improvement, perhaps not on such a large scale, Noirode Mansion was really the world having aged the most poorly.

This concludes this weekend's devlog, we will meet again soon for a new topic. Like, share, comment, and be well :) .