Secrets of Grindea » Weekly Recap #77: Aww Shiiiield

This week, aside from more Winterland animations, Fred has been working on some more equipment! The game had a shortage of shields in particular, so we set out on a quest to rectify that.

Here’s a little video that shows the process of creating a new weapon and a shield:

Apart from the Iron Shield shown in that video, there’s also the Barrel Shield, the Energy Shield and the Crystal Shield:

barrelshield wispshield crystalshield

We’re doing our best to add secondary stats and special effect on equipment of similar tier.

Secondary stats means that even if an armor piece usually raises DEF, and a weapon usually raises ATK, that’s not all they could do. Perhaps the armor is a wizard’s robe raising INT, or maybe it’s cursed and will raise ATK while actually lowering DEF? Conversely, perhaps you could fight with a wrench, which has weaker ATK than a same tier sword, but raises DEF or the recovery speed of your shield.

Special effects on equipment are a bit more advanced than regular stats. For example, the Energy Shield will power up projectiles you bounce back with Perfect Guard, making them deal 50 % more damage. The Crystal Shield has about half the HP of the other shields, but the Perfect Guard damage reduction is 85 % instead of 50 %, making it much more durable if you trust your ability to perfect guard consistently.

The goal is that We don’t want every equipment swap to be based on a quick glance, but to have players select gear suiting their play style.

To end this post we have a little something from Vilya as well: a couple of skill icons!

skill icons
Some are new, some have been improved. Which has been the overall theme for her work these weeks – making small changes here and there, especially around the dungeon. Next up for her, however, is continuing the cave area we showed a few weeks back, so stay tuned for that!

Posted by Secrets of Grindea at 2013/05/14. Tags: Development Video, Weekly Recap.

Heriberto wrote at 14/05/2013 01:26:

Do you plan to translate the game into Portuguese PT-BR (Brazil)?

Jasson wrote at 14/05/2013 04:30:

Fred watching you work is awesome! So many animations! How many items do you guys plan to have total? It looks like there is quite a bit of work for each one.

McToast wrote at 14/05/2013 12:36:

Moin

Simply amazing. I really like the straightforwardness of SoG so far.

The new shields really look cool. There are so many possibilitys that include perfect guard! Spontaneously I’d come up with a spiked shield, that returns xx% of damage to the enemy when performing a perfect guard and a vampire shield, that leeches x points of HP from the enemy and converts it into HP for the player. And how about enchant shield spells? For example “electrify shield”. Costs a certain amount of mana, a little upkeep and lasts for xx seconds. Each perfect guard with your shield shocks all enemies close to you, dealing a small amount of damage and stunning them for 0,5 seconds. Or “burning shield” that placed a DoT on the enemy when performing perfect guard. Only one enchantment can be active on a shield at the same time.

Do you plan to add special stats for armor/hats as well? And while we’re at it, is there more armor than just hats? There shouldn’t be too many slots, but I’d like to see armor for head, chest and maybe feet. Shouldn’t be more than 3 slots in my opinion, but would give interesting options for special abilitys. A special wizard hat might give a bonus of +5 to mana, while special boots might grant a +25% movement speed bonus for a few seconds. An armor could give a bonus to a spell school etc. I think this would set the different items apart while not making the overall gameplay too complicated.

Keep it up!

Grüße,
regards,
the Toast

Sogomn wrote at 14/05/2013 17:16:

I like the Crystal Shield very much! :)

@Heriberto: Propably, the game won’t be translated by Pixel Ferrets but there will be a program for making your own translations. I expect that there will be quite a lot fan translations in many languages.

Great work as always, by the way :D
I still love the summon-a-plant-skill and the new icon makes it even cuter!

Sogomn

Aaron wrote at 14/05/2013 19:51:

I just have to say, I have been following the Weekly Recaps for months now and I love everything. You guys are something special to be making a game with this amount of depth. I cannot wait for the release! Until then, I will continue to watch your progress.

Thank you for all of your hard work!

Aaron

StrantZ wrote at 15/05/2013 04:53:

Simply great. Thank you for the new video. I don’t know what else to say you guys, I mean…I am sold. Keep up the great work as always.

pokeyoshi3 wrote at 15/05/2013 14:26:

Which game enging do you use?

Kevin wrote at 15/05/2013 21:17:

Half question and half suggestion; creating skins for weapons and shields looks fairly ‘simple’ to a degree. Will there be any possibility of having a Cladun-esque editor for a specific set of shield and weapons, to create ones’ own niche look?

Nick Everlith wrote at 17/05/2013 17:48:

Don’t know if you guys read these comments, but I would recommend setting up an automated system for the weapon overlays. Early on in my game’s development, I came to the realization that I would either spend hours and hours painstakingly drawing every single frame for my weapon animations, or I would just program something to automatically rotate and generate the icons for me. I’m sure that you can come up with an elegant solution which does not compromise the quality of the art.

My current project, which is similar in style and scope, has over 160 unique weapons which are all completely animated. I just have to draw a single frame for each weapon and my program automatically processes the rest of them. It’s saved hundreds of hours of time.