Now that we’re done with the Arcadia rework for now, things are happening fast in terms of the desert enemies! Teddy has been making a ton of prototyping and it’s now possible for us to play around with the basic enemy compositions.

First, here’s a very early look of the Cacute enemy, jumping around, minding its own business:

As mentioned before, our plan for these guys is that they won’t focus on the player in particular, but will be dangerous just by existing – as you can see, they launch a bunch of needles with each jump!

The new slime and bird enemies have been added as well, the slime becoming a saw Giga-Slime style as it attacks, while the bird is pretty much an egg-laying bee!

In order to mix this up a bit, we’re playing around with having the bird lay eggs closer to the ground, so you can actually hit it while it lays them. Our original idea was to have each egg spawn another bird unless you break it in time, but we’re also playing around with having it lay different kinds of eggs, each with a hazard of its own. However, it might end up too similar to the mimic which you just fought, so we might play around with some other ideas as well.

We’ll need to play around with it a bit more before we know exactly how these will work in the end. Also, the Solem has not been made yet, and it might mix things up a lot once it joins these compositions!

The first portrait this week is that of one of the ice cream sellers shown last week! She owns the shop with her fiancé, and we have some plans to include these in a quest featuring another duo interested in sweets… Actually making that quest will probably wait ’til the rest of the desert and the quests we planned earlier are finished, though :)

The second ice cream seller is the fiancé of the previous one! I’m sure he’s happy to be able to own such a sweet (ha) business with the love of his life – who wouldn’t be?!

Right now we haven’t decided on any actual use for the ice creams, though it would certainly be fun to be able to buy some. Feel free to share any ideas you might have on potential uses for them! Is there a consumable type you feel is missing? Want more pet food? Let’s hear your ideas!

Finished portrait:

Next, I’ve been working on the fundamentals of a new kind of interior, the one you’ll find in the desert ruins! I wanted to make something special for it, since it was a while since I made something a bit more ‘out there’ – the town interiors generally follow the same basics, so I wanted to make something different this time.

What I’ve done here is I’ve played around with walls and floor textures, and made some basic decorative things. I’m not 100% sure about the colors yet, I might tint them a bit yellow to make sure they fit the overall desert aesthetics, but once that’s done I’m ready to use these things as a base for the remaining interiors I need to make.

The desert ruins aren’t huge – only 2 (rather big) rooms are planned, but I wanted to make sure they feel special, hence the extra effort spent on getting a feel for it.

Video showing the progress here:

In Freds department, the NPCs and their animations continue to be made! First, we have the author:

When we’re done with the rest of story mode, we actually have plans to add her to the library in Evergrind City early in the game, when she’s there temporarily for a signing. We’d like to tie together the whole world of Grindea, and having her (and maybe one or two other desert characters) appear in Evergrind early in the game is a step to make the player feel recognition when you run into them later in the game.

Next up, an animation for the forgotten farmer, living in the depths of the caves beneath the desert (more to come):

Finally, the most exciting news…. The very first sketches of the Captain, who will be the boss in the next dungeon: the ghost ship. We have a really cool idea for this dungeon, and this guy plays a key part in it… Stay tuned for more!!

This week it’s on to more desert town interiors! When this one is done there’s just one more to make, oh my! Time sure flies when you have lots of fun things to do… :)

So this building belongs to the mayor of the desert town, and the story I’ve come up with for the bottom floor is that he has it open to visitors that want to come in and look at his small but very expensive collection of antiques. Maybe you’ll recognize some of the items from your travels back in time… ;)

Unfortunately tragedy has befallen the collection and a statue has broken. If only you knew someone who could fix it…..

Finished floor, for now:

Next, the second floor! Upstairs we have a bedroom, with a staircase that leads to the rooftops. Here you might meet the Mayor’s wife, who is yet to be designed :)

Finished room, for now (I’m not super happy about the bed so I might remake it at some point!):

The first portrait this week features a lady hanging out in the beach area of the desert town, enjoying the wonderful weather. We’ve had epic weather here the last couple of weeks too, so it actually fits really well!

Finished sprite:

The second portrait features the person throwing coins into the well in the desert area, shown a while back! This girl is a visitor from Merchant Isle’s. What do you think she’s wishing for?

As for for Fred’s work this week, we have a little sneak peek of one of the next bosses you’ll run into! Ohhh yeahhh, he’s back:

Marino returns and has learned a new skill! To be precise, he’ll be using one of the player skills in his second fight against the main character. We felt that there are already so many humans relying solely on weapons that we wanted to mix it up and add some more skills in this battle. Can you guess which one he’ll be using?

There are also some new faces in the desert town (yeah, they keep coming!), this time in the shape of the couple (literally) who own the ice cream parlor! I’ll be adding these to my to-do portrait list as well, so stay tuned for more of them in the near future :)

This week has been a very busy time for us Pixel Ferrets! It was time for the annual Gotland Game Conference, where we got to go to our old campus and judge the games the students made this year.

This year things were a little different: there were new award categories and a whole new voting system, which means as opposed to previous years we were expected to play all of the games this time! We’ve always tried to play as many games as possible, but this year it was for real. GGC started off, as usual, with us getting split into groups in order to listen to the student presentations (which we were judging as well), then we had the rest of the day until way into the evening and the day after to play their games.

The second day (Tuesday) continued with another full day of game testing (there are 34 games in total, so as you can imagine playing all of them takes a lot of time)! In the evening we met up with the other judges and voted on what games we thought were fit to win each award. Then we had one final day (Wednesday) to play any remaining games, especially the ones nominated by the other jurors, before we met up for a 3 hours long discussion about which games should win. At about 19:00 there was be a fancy award ceremony with an after party. Whew!

Here are some photos, courtesy of Gotland Game Conference’s Facebook page:

We tried our best to mash in some dev time among this craziness as well, so first up we have the possibly most important (for the inhabitants of Grindea anyway) room interior of them all: the Ice Cream Parlor!!! What stroll along the beach in this hot seaside town is complete without a cooling ice cream?

Best part about this is I got to be creative with the ice cream flavors, which was a blast. I’d totally try most of these, no questions asked. Which ones would you like to try?

Next up, we have a shield maker! This dude sells shields in the market area of the desert town, sharing a stand with the potion seller and sword smith!

Finished sprite:

The next portrait is of an old, forgotten master farmer (in the literal sense), whom you’ll have the (mis)fortune of meeting along your travels! Forgotten by his family, this man holds a grudge that will come back to haunt the inhabitants of the desert! Oh my…

Finished portrait:

Meanwhile in Fred’s department, we have the animation for the photographer girl who hands you the photography quest (if you’ve played the latest Arcadia rework update you might have seen her already), as well as possibly the most important thing in any typical harbor town. What I’m talking about? Seagulls, for course!!

This week we’ve finally started going through (and implementing) the sound effects! As usual when we start this part of development, we’ve sent out a request for a bazillion sounds to our trusted sound effect person, Fark who then promptly provides us with what we asked for, sometimes with several options!

To decide on these options, we go through each sound effect one by one and select our favorites. We tend to do this separately when we have the time, so to note others of our preference we have a grand google doc which looks something like this:

Whenever someone has listened to a sound effect, they put down their preference beneath the name of the sound effect, noting who they are by using the first letter of their name. If two people are in agreement that’s the sound that gets chosen, and if nobody agrees on any one option, there’s usually a discussion some time after everyone has noted their preferences.

Sound effects really make such a huge difference to the game, and we’re super happy to be able to work with Fark in this way and get the bestest sounds for Grindea! Can’t wait for you to hear those cute Loods – which, by the way, you might be able to later today when we have a frontline update scheduled! :)

Moving on with the desert stuff, there are still a bunch of interiors to finish. By now I’ve made so many random items across the game that a lot of them can be reused in various ways, and for this room in particular I used a bunch of old stuff either as is or after making some slight changes to them.

This house, you see, is a warehouse that stores a ton of random objects, so what better place to reuse a bunch of those random things, such as jars, chests, boxes and whatnot? Of course, we wanted to keep the feel of the desert interiors so where’s a bunch of carpets and such as well.

Below you can see it in its current form, though I couldn’t help myself and added a few more items after finishing up the video (as well as fixing the missing pixels on one of the carpets, oops) :)

Next up we have another portrait! This guy is strolling along the market, looking at the wares. How interesting!

The next portrait is of one character you might have come across before, though not personally. You see, this is Professor Mandrake, who has been corresponding with Ivy recently. Such a swell guy, helping her with her research!

As you might guess, he will also be found in the desert. What he’s doing there? Why, wouldn’t you like to know!? You’ll just have to play and see ;)

Fred continues to make desert NPCs as well! Since I made the portrait for Mandrake, he began making his sprite:

When we designed this guy we though it’d be fun to make him a really buff guy. There’s this stereotype that professors are bookish and quiet, so this time we wanted to mix things up a little and make him a very charismatic, body building type of guy. Cause why not? :D

In the desert town, there’s another new NPC throwing coins into a fountain for luck:

…Meanwhile out in the water, something very strange is taking place:

Perhaps you recognize these silly guys from somewhere else. What are they doing in a boat? Where are they going? What will they do there? All to be answered in the upcoming main quest :D

The next desert interior we’ll take a look at is the house boat in the harbor area! In this version the door is centered while the exterior has it more to the left, so I’ll move that around later to suit the outside version.

Other than that the interior is slightly different compared to the regular houses, with different kinds of windows and another type of bed. There’s also some slight color variations and edits of some of the props!

WIP & finished version below:

Next up we have a random house that will be right next to the market! We don’t really have any fixed plans for this house yet, so I’m just whipping together a quick basic house that can be inhabited by pretty much any of the NPCs already made:

Maybe in the future we’ll have a more specific idea of who lives here and what kind of person they are, in order to make the place more personal. Until then, it’s just another example of the desert style housing~

This week’s first portrait features a girl walking around in the desert town! I call her a beach girl even though she will probably be walking around in the market, as she is dressed like someone strolling along the beach! She’s probably visiting the town as a tourist, having a relaxing vacation.

WIP video:

Finished sprite:

The second portrait features a guy lying on the beach getting an intense sunburn. Do not do this at home kids, this is not very healthy for your skin! The character is based on this sprite made by Fred:

WIP video (also featuring the creation of the final sprite this time, woohoo):

…and the finished thing:

Meanwhile in the animation department, the boss work continues! Fred has worked hard with the new epic Solem boss, who gets an epic laser attack through a mystical gem, oh my!!

Previously we said all Solems will have the laser attack, but we then changed our minds and decided that it would simply make them a bit too crazy for regular enemies. Saving the attack for a boss is totally OK though!

No ancient ruin is complete without its own sets of traps, of course, and since we all grew up watching the #1 adventurer of all time running away in panic from a rock, it’s time for you to do just that in Grindea!

In order to have a cool rock to run away from Fred started making a bunch of ’em, to see which one we liked the most:

And here we have it, in all its glory, chasing our unsuspecting heroes as they steal an ancient treasure totally mind their own business, how unfair!

After having gone many weeks now without having any meetings (we’ve all been busy doing our parts for the Arcadia rework and desert) it was finally time for us to have another discussion about future events in the game!

Very soon we hope that Teddy will have rid Arcade Mode of the more severe bugs, and as such be ready to move on to the desert. Story wise, there are a couple of important things happening here before the player is ready to move on to the fourth ‘dungeon’. One such thing is a boss fight inside a small temple we have yet to make – which is what we discussed today.

So, in this temple we plan on having one special puzzle where you have to use a translation of an ancient language to move blocks (or something similar) to specific places in order to unlock a secret doorway. This doorway leads to an open room with a long staircase (exactly how long, we’ll have to test). At the top of the staircase is a treasure which the player needs. As you take the treasure something horrible will happen that causes you to run down the stairs, only to have your way blocked and a boss fight to ensue – more on what boss will appear later in the post… :)

Above you have a very finished (not) sketch of the area inside the secret door.

Next, you need to get to the final ‘dungeon’. As we have mentioned before, this will be a ghost ship, and as such, you will need to get there by boat (a very small one, to be precise). We’ve had some ideas on how to go about getting the player there – we of course knew it had to be by boat, but how to actually get inside the ship, and what the scenery would look like from outside. Today we talked and made some sketches that deal with that as well!

Basically you’ll approach the ghost ship from the side, and the camera will scroll up once you get to an entry point, to show the ship as a whole along with the zone title. We hope this will serve as a semi-dramatic introduction to the area!

Then, the camera will scroll back down to your little boat which now has a pair of boards connecting it to the bigger ship so you can enter it:

11/10 sketches I know, haha.. Well, as soon as I’ve completed my part of the desert graphics I’ll start working on this ship and its interiors for real. Already looking forward to it! :)

Before I can do any work on the ghost ship, I need to finish up this church, among other things! Using the clock tower as a base, I create this random holy space in the middle of the port town. Who might you find here? You might be able to guess!

Finished interior, for now:

The first portrait this week (yeah, I’ll probably start posting at least two per week to keep up with Fred’s output and be able to post them all before we’re done with the town, haha) belongs a character made by Fred quite a while ago, a guy who fell asleep on the beach while reading. Here’s a reminder of what he looks like:

I don’t know whether he will wake up later or not, for now though I opted to make his portrait asleep as well. Most likely his dialogue will simply be ‘zzz’ or some sleep talking for now. If he were to wake up he would need a new animation, so I’ll save making an expression for him when he’s awake until then :)

Finished sprite for now:

So the NEXT one this week ( did you know there are 14 more after this to be precise? Oh my)! I’m not sure exactly what this guy’s backstory will be but I believe Fred intended for him to be one of Master Ji’s graduated students (it is based off a NPC sprite he made). The WIP:

Finished portrait:

So obviously Fred keeps busy doing desert things as well! Not only does he continue making NPCs, he has also started working on one of the bosses you will face in this area. Below you can see the work in progress and final version of the boss you’ll fight inside the temple mentioned earlier:

Basically it’s a more advanced version of the Solems which will appear in the desert as regular enemies, powered by a mysterious crystal, oh my!

Fred has also been working on this NPC whose portrait was posted before, who I think might be Master Ji’s graduated pupil:

And here’s some of the work in progress versions of this guy before the final version was decided upon:

Another week means more interior stuff for the desert! In this next and final part of that first desert house, it’s time to add some details. Tassels, carpet fringes, carrots and half-dead plants are some of the things that are on the menu for this video. Check it out here:

 

Now it’s time for the next interior, the one belonging to an author living in the desert town! As with the previous interior, in this first video I’ll add and create all the basics, with details to be added in a later part:

 

The next part is adding the smaller details. It’s a slightly shorter video since the base for several of these items already exists! The idea here was to fill the house with books and papers – previous drafts, notes and other things she might have jotted down in her work. Stuff like that! Also made room for a pet of some kind in the video above (the bed and water bowl), I am hoping for a cat but it’s not yet decided :)

 

And here’s the finished house:

Next up, a portrait – there’s still a bunch left before all of the desert NPCs have their portraits, whew! This one belongs to the character sitting in the harbor, made by Fred last week :)

And the finished sprite:

…and as we draw ever closer to completing the desert, there are more NPCs and more portraits needed! Hence another one this week. This one is the author who will live in the house I just made, while she’s working on her latest novel. Perhaps you can help her with some ideas?

 

Time for another update on what goes on behind the scenes so to speak!

First of all, we’ve verified our Discord server (a while ago actually, but since we haven’t talked about the Discord server much on this blog I thought it was time to mention it)! What this means is basically that we got a fancy new invite link, which I would recommend you to use if you’re interested in joining our awesome community for a chat: https://discord.gg/secretsofgrindea

Come hang out with me, Teddy and the amazing people of our server :)

We’ve also recently had our annual meeting! Development wise, this isn’t really affecting anything (except that we need to actually have the meeting), but it’s a good opportunity to make sure everything’s working as it should business wise. It’s sometimes easy to forget that being an indie developer is not just a matter of doing art or programming day in and day out: sometimes we have to take care of the boring stuff as well (such as financial statements and other joyous things).

Since keeping track of our finances and making sure everything we do is properly reported to the Swedish government is something that very much affects development (in that it eats a lot of time), we’ve made the decision to get rid of as much of that as possible. In other words: hire someone to do it for us. The three of us have always taken pride in doing as much as possible by ourselves, but we feel that this bookkeeping aspect has little to do with actually making the game, and paying someone to do it for us will unlock more development time for Teddy, who has done those things so far.

And in other streamlining news, we’ve made it a lot easier to test new maps. Previously, whenever I made a sketch of a new area, Teddy had to manually load the background into the game and update the build (which can take a while). Then what often happened as we ran around the map with our characters, is that I’d find really dumb flaws that are quite obvious once you see the sketch in a more realistic setting with the full interface and all that.

So now, Teddy has made it possible for me to upload any background I need to test in the game simply by replacing a .png file in the build’s folder. This will then automatically add the map to the game, which can then be accessed through a shortcut in character select. Now I can try out the maps myself and fix all those obvious flaws before involving Fred and Teddy at all! This way, when we finally try out the map together in multiplayer, I’ve already removed distracting polish-issues like the one below:

Now, time to continue with the cave system! Here’s the final cave, the one I never decorated last week when I did the others. You see, this is a very special cave, where there will be a boss fight of some sort… But I will say no more!

Anyway, this cave is a little more moist than the rest of the desert, and so there will be some greenery in here. Also some strange old rags, and a place to sleep. How odd! Here’s the WIP video:

Now, finally, it’s time to move on to some interiors. The first building we’ll do is the little farmer’s hut in one of the desert maps. The first house in any new area is very important, as it will set the tone and style for the interior in the surrounding buildings as well. As such, I’ll be making a ton of new items for this house alone, and have decided to split up the work in a couple of videos!

In this first part, we begin in the lower left part of the house, creating a bench, a table, a bad, some cushions to sit on and some decorations in the form of carpets, a new flower pot and a small table cloth:

In the second part it’s time to add wall decors, a chest, another flower in a jar, the bed in another direction, a shelf – and some poor plants failing to grow that will likely only be seen in this house – they are having some troubles with their crops in this harsh desert!

In the animation department, Fred delivers some more NPCs this week. We want the desert town to feel bustling indeed, so we need a ton of people populating the area. So, here’s another batch of people, featuring a girl sitting by the port swinging her legs, a guy applying sunscreen, and two people walking around town:

Hey guys! It’s a new week and new adventures. First, though, let’s take a look at some of those last minute fixes for Arcadia.

Some of you might have noticed some very wonky backgrounds for some of the Mt Bloom challenges! This is due to a miscommunication between me and Teddy: he had made a couple of backgrounds by copying and pasting random pieces of old backgrounds into something that fit with the phase challenges he designed. However, he forgot to tell me about these and so when the patch initially launched, it launched with the WIP bakgrounds – oops!

While this has been fixed, though it hasn’t been updated in the game yet. For now, enjoy the rather wonky WIP versions, haha!

Another thing that will be added soon-ish are the achievements for the two new floors. As always, there will be one achievement for reaching the floors, respectively, as well as one for clearing all the available challenges and for getting S-rank on both floors of the same theme.

Other than that, it’s more bug fixing and fixes on the menu for Teddy while me and Fred will continue on to the desert! Fun times :)

And the next step on the desert menu for me is of course to repeat the whole process of the previous cave map and create aaaall the rest of them in their most basic form to begin with: meaning walls, floors and any stairs/dropdowns/doorways:

The room above will be used twice for two different caves, and you’ll be able to tell them apart by the decorations.

Next, this big boss room will be cut off at the top…

…to make sure you don’t spot the boss if you were to enter the cave from this side:

Finally, it’s time to decorate everything! Starting with the first floor, I added a bunch of crystals in the walls, more mushroom types, and a bunch of small rocks to decorate the areas as a whole:

Then, it’s on to apply it all to all of the other maps! For this map I also created a stair leading to the upper floor:

…and for these, stairs leading to the lower floors. Here you can also see the difference between the two maps, making them quite distinct from one another even though they’re the same size:

As you may notice, the cave with the alleged boss fight is missing from this lineup: that’s because I will make a different kind of decoration for that area! Stay tuned ;)

First though, it’s time for another portrait, and another video! I decided to record this one since I was making this portrait at home rather than the office, and the quick export feature that I use to make the images that make up the GIF is broken there (I should fix it, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet). So for now, here’s another video featuring the creation of one of the card players in the saloon:

And finally, let’s end the week with one more portrait. This is a very important NPC, based on our composer: Andrew Riley of Lucky Lion Studios! His NPC will, naturally, be a musician, who among other things will appear in Arcadia to help you change the town music.

In story mode, he’ll be hanging out in the desert town, playing music to anyone who passes by. Maybe he’ll make an appearance somewhere else as well? Who can tell!

Time to make Grindeas first set of boats! Starting with a small and rather simple one, there will be several more before we’re done. This is actually the first time I’m drawing boats, so bear with me and expect several stages of improving and adding details to these as we continue on.

Without further ado, the first one:

The second boat is actually more of a ship! There will be another similar one of these nearby, too. As you can see in the WIP video below, at first the sail was down, but as it was pointed out to me you don’t keep sails down while in port… I changed it (I know absolutely nothing of ships but it was a pretty dumb thing to not realize sooner! I’m sorry!)

WIP and finished thing:

Time for the third “boat”, which also is no regular boat, but a houseboat! I’m not 100% this is the color scheme we’ll go for in the end, but for now it’s a green, red and brown quirky kind of deal:

The final boat post this week and the final boat in the port: another smaller vessel this time, filled with cargo! Maybe it has come in from a bigger ship docked outside the harbor area?

As for Fred, this week he continues to make NPCs for the Saloon! As mentioned last week, there will be a lot of different characters here, and not all are human… Below is another selection of people visiting or working at this place: a bartender cleaning a glass, a caveling using a slot machine, someone at the bar, and a pianist for entertainment!

…and yes, Teddy is still working on implementing all the new Arcadia systems! Keep in mind there’s a lot of new mechanics to add, so it’s taking a little while. He’s aaaalmost done and ready to let us inhouse test before handing it over to you guys though! Stay with us just a couple of more weeks~