As the majority probably already knows by now, Steam’s new submission system Greenlight launched last Thursday, and we were lucky enough to jump into the mix quite early. If you have a Steam account but haven’t voted for us yet, you can find our Greenlight profile by clicking the image below!

We’re very happy with how the launch worked out for us. Partly thanks to getting in when there were only a few pages of submissions, we’ve got a ton of sweet exposure through Greenlight. At the time of writing, we’ve got 39 540 visitors, 4 909 favorites and 975 comments! That’s pretty insane.

We’ve also seen a really massive influx of Facebook likes, going from 460 to 600 in four days!

We realize this is largely because a lot of you guys have been spreading the word about the game, so a huge thanks goes out to you all for helping us out :)

Despite the number of Greenlight favorites, we’re still “only” at 4 %, but we think there’s no need to worry. Valve has stated that the number of votes isn’t the be all and end all of success, and Secrets of Grindea won’t even be released for a while so it’s not a catastrophe for us if we don’t get 100 % right away.

Regarding the beta, we’re still on said track: one week from now we’ll send out a handful of invites to test “administrative” stuff, like how the invites work, what forum categories we’ll need for the Beta forum, error reporting and so forth. A week after that, we’ll open the gates for the “real” beta testing! It’s been really cool to see the amount of interest and encouragement in the beta thread, and it’s still not too late to post in there if you haven’t. As mentioned in the thread, we’ll choose randomly from everyone who posts there before the beta starts!

So, a lot of time and energy have went into getting things ready for Greenlight and the beta, but we have managed to still get some work done on the game itself! Due to popular demand, we’ve added an experience bar to the HUD (previously it was shown only in the menu), as well as buff indicators.

When a buff is about to run out, it will start pulsating, and eventually become tinted red before disappearing. We might go for a WoW-like cooldown timer approach if testers find this system to be unclear, although the tiny resolution might make that a bit messy. The buffs in the screenshot above are a damage increasing potion, and a spell which increases attack- and cast speed!

We’ve also changed up the notices for when you complete a quest, get a new card and gain an achievement. They used to look very much alike, so we decided to add some flair to each of them:

Sort of how they all used to look

How they’re looking now

In game, they are filled with text and images, of course. Apart from the GUI-work, here’s a brand new two handed weapon you’ll be able to craft!

So yeah, that’s what’s been going on! Back to crunching!