Vilya's Work-blog! (aka Pixel Ferrets behind the scenes)

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 08, 2015

Masks, Achievements & Minor Portrait Upgrades

Vilya: Everyone loves hats, right? So let's start this post with the latest bunch of new headgear:

Pretty basic stuff to begin with: a half-face mask, a flowerband and a common black hairband. Then we have a pair of green feelers for those of you wanting to channel your inner insect, and a mask that from the beginning, based on Anonymous suggestion, was inspired by the Kodamas, but ended up a juust a bit more symmetric than they typically are ;P

More on this at:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/masks-achievements-minor-portrait.html
​

SEPTEMBER 09, 2015

A Look at Shady Merchant


Vilya: As we mentioned before, Shady Merchant is graduating from his service as Accessory salesman, and getting his own niche: selling items that you have previously sold to other merchants.

As such, it's only fair that he gets his very own shop title:



But we're not gonna stop there! We've decided to implement a fun little visual thing about him. Namely, the more items you've sold, the more items he'll surround himself with. So in the beginning, he'll simply look the way he is right now, sitting on an empty carpet in the midst of Evergrind City.

Once you start selling stuff, though....

I know what happens if sell him stuff. Do you want to find out? You can at:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/a-look-at-shady-merchant.html
​

SEPTEMBER 10, 2015

Portrait of a Woman

Vilya: Time for another portrait, this time of a woman that should appear in the Embassy of the time travel town!



See more of Vilyas work progress over at:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/portrait-of-woman.html​

 

[Own]

@Vilya asked for festival decoration suggestions.



These would be pretty cute, I think. Four little faceless cardboard figures for you and your party to pose behind for a cheap laugh.

I'm not sure what four cutouts would look best, though. A stylized Gigaslime, Phaseman, Gundam and Winter? Slime, Rabby, Bloomo and Boar?

 

[GarlicJelly]

@Vilya asked for festival decoration suggestions.

View attachment 950

These would be pretty cute, I think. Four little faceless cardboard figures for you and your party to pose behind for a cheap laugh.

I'm not sure what four cutouts would look best, though. A stylized Gigaslime, Phaseman, Gundam and Winter? Slime, Rabby, Bloomo and Boar?

Marino, his sister or maybe his mother? Belmonth the baker? I would love to look silly as any of the NPCs. Maybe there could be one for every NPC next to them in the city with maybe a silly quest where you have to try all of them?

 

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 11, 2015

Billy the Kid

Vilya: Aaand, we'll and the week with another portrait, of a kid! I was playing around with a slightly different style (particularly in the shading) here.

Not sure yet if we'll keep it as it is, start using it on more portraits or if I'll end up going back to fix this one later on. Either way it was fun to try something new!


Line Art
​

SEPTEMBER 14, 2015

How to Ask For Press Keys
Vilya: A new week is coming, but the floods of e-mail we get from people requesting free keys for Secrets of Grindea show no signs of stopping anytime soon! It's super flattering, really - lots of people wanting to play our game! A year ago I'd never believe something like this would happen

Of course, a lot of the mails we get are quite obviously from scammers pretending to have YT-channels they don't even link to, as well as those who claim to be famous streamers they quite clearly aren't... But there are also people who only come across of one of the two, as they simply forget to link to their channel, or didn't see the use of having their e-mail mentioned in their channel description.

So, in comes this post. I don't know if anyone that needs to read it actually will, but hey - here's to hoping.

Let me begin this post by answering an important question:

Why don't you just give keys to everyone asking?

In the perfect world, where food & shelter is free and you don't need money to survive, I'd love to give keys to everyone who asked. It would be a true joy to bring happiness to those who may not have enough money to spend $15 on a game! Unfortunately, we don't live in such a world, and we also need money to survive - otherwise we wouldn't be able to work on this game at all!

And so, we prefer to give keys to people who would like to do something with the game - maybe a let's play, or an article or preview... That sort of thing, that gives us a bit of coverage and them something to write/make videos about.

Nowadays we're actually quite wary even of those kinds of people, as we've been scammed a few times by YouTubers who ended up selling the keys we gave them. Honestly, if you see anyone doing this - please call them out on it! They're really making it harder for legit people asking for press copies by causing devs to become increasingly suspicious of accounts that look right.

So, who DO you give keys to?

Basically, we give keys to people who want to cover our game in some way and fulfill three criteria:

1) You have an active account (and you actually link it!)
Whether it's a YouTube account, Twitch account, newspage, whatever. If there has been no content posted in the recent month(s), or you don't provide us with a link at all, we tend to be skeptical of whether you'll actually cover the game, or if you're just fishing for free keys for you and your friends.

2) People actually view your stuff
Let's face it - anyone can create a blog or YouTube account and refresh their videos a few times until it looks like they have 10 hardcore viewers who follow anything they post. While we totally appreciate how hard it can be to start out and build an audience, if we were to provide free keys to everyone with a YouTube account, we'd have to give 'em to everyone on the internet.

3) We can verify who you are
Please, please, please write your mail out in the description of your YouTube channel (they even have that cool "for business inquiries - view e-mail address" button nowadays), under some 'about' tab on your blog/website, or wherever. Even better if you, in your e-mail, point us towards the place where we can verify that this address belongs to who you say you are (of course, this doesn't apply to sites who use the mail belonging to their own domain).

Honestly, this is the #1 reason why we sometimes don't send out keys - too many people pretend to be someone they aren't. You'd be surprised how many e-mails we get from people claiming to be someone, only for us to find out, 2 clicks later, that the owner of the linked account has a completely different mail. So I'm sure you can understand why we don't send out keys to those we can't 100% confirm are who they say they are - we really don't want to encourage people stealing others identities just to get free game keys..

Back in the days we'd spend a lot of time investigating these things, googling & messaging back and forth. However, this ended up taking way too much time for a small studio of 3 people. We'd really prefer to actually be working on the game, and to be honest, we're quite happy with the crowd we have already - at least until the game is closer to finished.

So basically, we're less likely to spend additional time investigating & sending keys to anyone who doesn't provide us with enough information on their own. So if you're looking for a press copy - make sure you've read the above before sending your mail. It'll save us both a lot of time and hassle.
​

 

[Own]

The popcorn stand looks adorable today.

Another festival decoration:

How about a Petting Zoo Pen, set up by Farmer Oak? Little pen area with Green Slime, Blue Slime and Red Slime hopping around inside of it with infinite HP like chickens, to smack about as much as you like.

If the Red Slime could take damage and had a ridiculous amount of HP and dropped the Red Slime hat as an easter egg, since it's not accessible in Story Mode otherwise, that'd be a fun little thing too.

 

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 15, 2015

Sketching Away

Vilya: Something I'm trying to become better at is planning what to do next & preparing for it properly. At times, I simply wake up, look at my tasklist, pick something and start working with minimal preparations. Sometimes this works well, sometimes my work tends to get a bit uninspired.


Recently I've found that taking a break from the computer screen and sketching in a notebook helps a lot with my workflow. For some reason it feels much easier sketching freely and try out random ideas when it's 'just' a notebook, rather than when you've created a Photoshop document for the specific task. Afterwards, I have a clear idea of what I want to create and often it ends up looking better because I took some time sketching multiple versions.

So, what have I been sketching recently? Hats, Hats & Hats! Here's a small selection of hats that may (or may not) appear in the future:



http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/sketching-away.html
​

SEPTEMBER 17, 2015

Another Priest

Vilya: Time for another time travel portrait! This time around I made a sketch on paper rather than digitally (as mentioned in Tuesday's post), in order to mix things up a bit.

Perhaps I'll do it this some more in the future for portraits as well - it's been really nice to sketch away from the screen for a while.


Line Art

http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/another-priest.html
​

SEPTEMBER 18, 2015

Festival Stands

Vilya: The quest for making the festival seem more cool continues! In this post I'll share the creation of two stands that have been put together by the folks of Evergrind City: a balloon stand and a popcorn stand!

The balloon stand will be further improved by Fred, who will add a cluster of balloons unlike the others - these ones having the shapes of different animals found around Grindea, such as the Slime balloon seen in the weekly recap over at the devblog this week!



http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/festival-stands.html
​

 

[Own]

http://vilyaroo.blogspot.se/2015/09/queen-bee-testing.html

This fight is gonna be incredibly hard to balance, because the bees are such an odd kind of enemy. If you know how to use your shield, they really aren't that much of a hassle, but for those who aren't used to blocking... Well, let's just say there's no doubt about which enemy is on people's #1 hate list. Yep, it's the bees!

Let's be honest, if someone isn't used to blocking several hours and 2 story dungeons into the game, they're never going to be. It's a bit like worrying 10 hours into Secret of Mana that the players aren't using their spells or charge attacks against bosses, resulting in bosses being too hard.

The rest of the game is probably going to have to be balanced around the assumption that people aren't using their shields if it doesn't kick their butt into using 'em here.

Right now we're playing around with the mechanics of the fight. In the beginning, we wanted people to focus on killing the Queen Bee's servants, and she'd only dive the player after they were dead (at which point you can damage her). The rest of the time she'd be spewing honey or sending flying stingers your way.

Now we're thinking it might be more fun if she dives now and then, and works more like the Sentry. That is, she'll summon more bees the longer you fight, meaning you'll either have to kill off some of her bee servants from time to time or you'll end up with a lot of bees on your hands!

The tweaking continues - wish us luck

Speaking from my Arcade experience, mass swarms of bees aren't exactly challenging to deal with. They're tedious more than anything, though that might be different with slowing slime everywhere.

What I'd find interesting was if she had some sort of Pollenation mechanic. The battle arena has little plant pods absolutely everywhere that you can't interact with, but when she dives she leaves behind a glittery trail of pollen in the line she dove. If it hits plant pods, they sprout into black-shaded Thorn Plants that have a bit of health on them.

If she dives across Thorn Plants, they're pollenated again and turn into black-shaded Seedspitter Plants.

Seedspitter Plants possibly turn into black-shaded Leader Flowers? If any level of plants are killed, they just turn back into pods to be pollenated again in the future.

Her %-based attack could be sneezing out a cloud of pollen to cover the entire arena at 50% HP, filling it with thorn plants or upgrading existing plants.

That way you have to focus on growing threats from the ground while defending against and attacking the boss in the air. I'd have a heck of a lot of fun with that, fighting against 'evil' versions of Summon Plant.

 

[MrChocodemon]

Own is refering to

SEPTEMBER 21, 2015

Queen Bee Testing!

Vilya: This is what we're gonna be busy with today:

Read more on it here:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/queen-bee-testing.html

That way you can join the debate and voice your opinion on the topic.​

 

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 22, 2015

Additional Cutscene Portraits, Part 1

Vilya: As the cutscene prototypes are more or less completed (with the exception of a background I need to make), it's time to spice 'em up by giving the characters more expressions!

First up is Dad, who is getting a new expression with his eyes closed:



But wait! In the flashback cutscene, where he'll be appearing with his wife Charlotte, he's much younger. As such, we need a bunch of new portraits illustrating that:



If you want to know how the other portraits look like and also want to know more about Vilya's work.
Then you cam pay visit to her blog.
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/additional-cutscene-portraits-part-1.html​

 

[Own]

@Vilya The cutouts look wonderful! The only minor concern I have is the fact that there's only three. Poor fourth person in co-op gets left out... however rare it will be that 4 player story co-op runs are.

Other assorted festival decorations ideas:

Francisco's Kissing Booth - Pay some gold, get a kiss. Puts a blush on your character's cheeks for a little while, or puts little animated hearts bubbling up around them for a bit?

Robin's Dunking Booth - Pay some gold for the opportunity to dunk random Evergrindeans.

A target appears and moves by fast for you to shoot at from a distance, dunking whoever is sitting in the seat. Could just have one person sitting on the seat, or an assortment of people. Just create a single body sprite in a full body blueswimsuit and put the heads of random Grindeans on it after each dunking.

Of course, that requires coding and animation, unlike the cutouts, which goes a little beyond decorations.

 

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 23, 2015

Festival Cutouts

Vilya: When I asked for your suggestions on how to further decorate the Evergrind Festival, Own at the forums suggested cutouts which you can stand behind to make your character look different. So that's what we decided to do (thanks for the idea)!

We decided to make 2 different versions, one of a couple getting married and one of a monster (we picked the Snowbacca, cause why not)!

Final version without characters:


More on this can be found by clicking on the link:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/festival-cutouts.html​

SEPTEMBER 24, 2015

Additional Cutscene Portraits, Part 2

Vilya: A few more portraits for upcoming festival cutscenes! More to come as well, as a bunch of familiar faces come to hang out at the Festival




More Portraits can be seen here:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/additional-cutscene-portraits-part-2.html​

 

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 25, 2015

Treasure Cave, Part 1 + Drops & Stuff

Vilya: One of the major things we need for the flashback cutscene to be done is a huge cave filled with treasure, complete with the sleeping dragon Fred has been working on recently.

As the prototype of the cutscene is finished and we know where everything will take place, it's time for me to start working on the background!



Above is a very crude sketch where you can see where every major event with the characters will take place. This is important to know so that they won't get covered by any props, plus it gives me a chance to design things strategically based on where stuff happens.



Take a look at this flood of material:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/treasure-cave-part-1-drops-stuff.html​

 

[Own]

Fred put out something as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/CPyHplJWoAAQwNM.mp4

I was wondering when they would resurface in the story, hopefully they pose more of a challenge than they do in Arcade. Their lack of any ranged attacks make them a bit of a joke if you use any magic there. Same thing with Marino in Story. Would be nice if the lackeys had a Fireball or something if you refuse to get anywhere near 'em.

 

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 28, 2015

Treasure Cave, Part 2

Vilya: Part two of creating the treasure cave! Time to start drawing a lot of gold and adding trinkets to make it look more interesting. In this part I'll focus on the left part of the screen, and leave the right part for the next blog post

And here's what the left side of the cave looks like so far:



A progress video and much more info on Vilya's workprogress can be found at:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/treasure-cave-part-2.html​

 

[Own]

http://vilyaroo.blogspot.se/

Haha, the petting zoo looks cute. All it needs is a little fence or something around it like at Oak's farm.

I can't think of anything else that could be used to spruce up the festival, except maybe a bonfire tucked away somewhere in town, a few NPCs sitting or standing around it.

The Collector's HQ girl who is reading her book could be reading out stories around it (lore / history dropping), Edward/Bella could have little sticks with marshmallows on the end pointed at the fire, not sure who else would make sense to be there. Probably Master Ji. Maybe the snow hooded fishing girl, with her fishing line cut off and a fishstick put on the end of her stick to roast over the fire.

I think that would be a cute, warm gathering. <3 Though maybe fishergirl would be better suited at the fishing event.

 

[CatBug]

I want this update now! T^T

 

[Own]

Huh, @Teddy put out a neat video as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/CQKTXklWIAEulw1.mp4

Luke and Marino seem to be everywhere across the festival, always with you. I wonder how that's handled? Do they follow along behind you like a typical RPG (Final Fantasy 8, Chrono Trigger, etc)? That would be kind of cool.

 

[MrChocodemon]

SEPTEMBER 29, 2015

Treasure Cave, Part 3

Vilya: Time to finish up the treasure cave! Gonna add a few more props this time around, but mainly it's gonna be a whooole lot of copy pasting pre-existing gold piles Enjoy...



The finished right side, as seen above! Below is the complete thing, including the sleepy old dragon lurking about, made by Fred :3

http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/treasure-cave-part-3.html​

SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

More Festival Faces & Candy's Candies

Vilya: Our work with the Festival continues! Here we have Candy, selling candies outside the hat store:



Another bunch of portraits was needed as well, featuring people enjoying (or not?) the festivities, or, in the case of the Dojo guys, arranging one of the mini games!



http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/09/more-festival-faces-candys-candies.html​

OCTOBER 01, 2015

Festival Interface

Vilya: We finally started implementing the mini-games! Or rather, Teddy has been working on it for quite a while now, but now it's time for me to help out by making graphics for them

First up is the strength challenge, where you're supposed to hit a sand bag (?) as hard as you can. You can't just simply hit it randomly, though! Instead, we're using an interface where an arrow moves up and down indicating how much power will be used when you decide to launch your attack.

Here's Teddy's whitebox version:



And here's my take on the interface (we decided to go for a bit more minimalism in the design, no huge background as in his whiteboxed version :



http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/10/festival-interface.html​

 

[Own]

I believe a lot of these suggestions originally come from Own over at the forum, who is a great supplier of ideas! We really do take a lot of the stuff you tell us into consideration, so feel free to spam our forums with more systems or changes you'd like to see. We love to hear it!

Haha... I think actually every single thing in that blogpost came from me.

We've only talked a little bit about how this will work in terms of what level and gear you'll have as you battle the bosses, but we think we'll have you select between your latest three characters that reached the boss battle on a run. That way the level and gear will be authentic and you can try out the battle again with the exact same setup as the one you had when you won (or lost) the last time you got there. It also saves you the time it'd take to respec & equip your character every time you start a boss training battle.

I really like this idea, I was wondering how equipment could be handled. That's such a clever way of doing it. Recording your hero simulates things nicely.

* A fishing pond that unlocks as a town upgrade where you can spend some time fishing while waiting for friends to connect. The fishes will probably disappear once you start an actual run, so they won't give you any additional money or points, they're simply for fun

If you want to make them actually something semi-worthwhile to do between runs, or while waiting for a friend to unAFK / waiting for people to join into your game, there's a few ways to make that work.

- Combo Fishing. You start off catching a Wimp. Then the next hardest fish in the game. And the next. And the next, and so on, and so on. If you fail to hook a fish, or you lose the fish, you go back to Wimp. The first time you Combo up to #, you get essence. And the next time you first combo up to # past that, you get essence. That or you just get +1 Essence for every every single new combo number you hit. Get 5 fish the first time? +5 Essence. Get 8 fish the next time? +3 essence.

- Speed Fishing. You cast your line, you hook a fish. Standard. You now have 3 seconds to recast. One of three things happen: You have less time to hook the fish when the [!] pops up, the fish is quicker or the fish bar is smaller. Every single time you hook a fish one of these happens. Fail to fish again in time, or catch a new fish, and you reset back to step 1. Could have a similar payout to Combo Fishing in terms of Essence.

Things that wouldn't reward infinite Essence, but essentially a high-score-ish minigame for improving on.

 

[MrChocodemon]

OCTOBER 02, 2015

More Future Stuff!

This Tuesday was a bit of a different day! It started out normally, but pretty early in the day we had a meeting with a couple of people from the local newspaper, who did an interview about the company and what we're doing. Apparently someone (thanks, whoever you are) had told them that we do some cool stuff.

So that was pretty cool! Will be interesting to see how it turns out

After the interview we went back to do stuff for the festivals, but since I've been showing off a lot of that already, I thought I'd end this week by yet another post talking about future stuff! There were still a few points on our To-Talk-About-List that we hadn't covered yet, so last week we went to our beloved fast food place and had a talk!

First up, a pretty big one:

Boss Re-Battles in Arcade Mode
We'll be implementing an arena in Arcade Mode (which appears after you've unlocked a certain amount of Town upgrades) where you'll be able to train against bosses you've previously faced in your runs! This has been suggested on the forums, and we thought, why not?

More at:
http://vilyaroo.blogspot.de/2015/10/more-future-stuff.html​