This week we’ve started getting back into the groove after being away for so long.

After checking things out again after such a long while, we noticed a few things that needed changing or improvement, so as I (Vilya) went back to work I dove straight into that.

First up, one of the NPCs that will play a kind-of important role in the dungeon. We felt she looked too young in the first version, and needed another, even older version for a later map where some time have passed:

For the first rework I just grayed out her hair and added a hint of wrinkle at her mouth, while the second, older version has lighter gray hair and wrinkles both near her mouth and around her eyes.

Next up, we wanted the ape house to look a bit stranger than the rest of the houses, so as a first step I added a bunch of different-looking chimneys, indicating this house is a little more advanced than the rest. We also have plans for Fred to add some cool stuff to the house, such as a water wheel or something similar (plus he might animate the chimneys as well), so I think it’ll look pretty cool in the end:

I also made another prop to decorate Tai Ming’s second zone, a stack of barrels:

Since me and Teddy went to Stockholm unexpectedly and left Fred to his own devices for a bit more than a week, it was high time to get together at our favorite fast food place and make a new plan for some upcoming Tai Ming things, including the next upcoming BOSS fight!

This boss is based on the enemy seen above, a cave worm of sorts. Only it’ll be a loooot bigger!

The worm will have 3 main attacks, which are detailed in Swedish (and masterfully illustrated) in the image below:

Attack #1: The worm dives underground, leaving part of his body visible while he digs his way ahead. He’ll then surface and dive again, kind of like a dolphin, only every time he surfaces more of his body will be visible. You’ll take damage both from the worm diving onto you, but also from his spiked body if you touch it. However, you can still hit him while he does this, so if you’re careful you can get some nice damage in during this attack!

Attack #2: The worm surfaces head first, and spits a bunch of the regular enemy worms at you. These will damage you on impact, and will bounce once on the floor before they resume the regular enemy worm-pattern and become an additional obstacle on the playfield.

Attack #3: The worm uses his tail to whip you, dealing damage if you get hit!

Special: We’re not 100% sure about this yet, but hopefully it’ll be cool! So, after you’ve dealt enough damage, the worm will summon another worm to the playfield, making the challenge twice as hard! Double the boss, double the fun, right…? :)

Some people have suggested instead of adding another worm to the mix, we should split the current worm into two. I definitely like the idea myself, but we haven’t discussed the suggestion as a team yet. Would be cool to make it happen, though! :)

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Now, these recaps aren’t the same without ending with a bunch of Fred’s stuff, so here’s the guard(s) that will patrol Tai Ming, as well as an old man doing a fancy jump:

Hey guys! It’s me, Vilya, again! I’m the one who usually writes these blog posts, but as I’ve been gone for a little more than a week taking care of a critically sick cat, Fred took care of the last two recaps.

Since we all used to live together (me, Teddy, Fred and the two cats), and we still get together in the same apartment for work every day, the cats are very dear to all of us, meaning it’s been a tough couple of weeks. BUT, good news, Link the cat seems to have stabilized for now after a super serious and seemingly random bout of severe anemia, which had him hospitalized for over 5 days at one of Sweden’s biggest animal hospitals. He’s still eating a ton of medicine but he seems to get more and more energetic every day, so let’s hope he makes a full recovery!!

We’re officially back in the office and have been working as usual for a couple of days, so things should hopefully be back to normal unless something else happens! For this post, let’s take a look at some of the things we did before going away, which didn’t make it to a recap yet!

First up, continuing on Zone02 we have been adding the ancient version of the collector’s HQ:

Here you’ll get a quest or two that need to be finished before you can continue your adventured deeper into this mountain village! There will be a bunch of ancient collectors sparring here as well, which should help making the area feel alive :)

Oh yeah, and those shops below the HQ?

We decided to make them actual shops so you don’t have to travel all the way back to Evergrind in case you missed buying something there! Here’s their interface graphics:

I also went ahead and connected the road leading from the HQ and the building to the left with the exit to the third and final Tai Ming map, meaning the only major thing left to finish on this map is a gravesite in the northwest:

We also decided we wanted the bamboo decorations to be destructible, and in a pretty fun way at that! Instead of destroying the whole thing at once, you’ll have to whack ’em down, piece by piece. As such, they are now made of several parts:

And when you decide to destroy them, this is what it’ll look like:

Although we might add some additional effects, such as shaking of the sprite!

Finally, to mix things up, a portrait:

It was such a long time since I made portraits, but I have to get used to it quickly again! There will be a lot of NPCs in this village, after all :)

OK, that’s all for now, time to get back to work with full speed!!! Please stay healthy little cat, we have a game to finish! :D

Hey guys!

This week has been all over the place. Vilya and Teddy have been out of commission the entire week due to one of their cats becoming sick. They had to leave Gotland and travel to an animal hospital in Stockholm. Vilya’s written a lengthy post about it over at her personal blog, be sure to send her some love.

Because of this we don’t have that much to showcase this week. Fred has been staying behind, acting cat sitter to Vilya and Teddys other cat, while continuing to work on NPCs for Tai Ming.

Besides interacting with the NPCs through out the dungeon, Tai Ming features a pretty hefty amount of cutscenes as well. Below are some animations from one of the scenes we are working on at the moment!

This week, things have been moving along smoothly in the boss department. Teddy has pushed the prototype to a more or less finished state, adding a bunch of new attacks and patterns both for normal and hard mode. There’s still some fine tuning to be done, but the battle is fully playable at this stage. All that is left now is some graphical polish and of course, player feedback!

Below are some of the new attacks Teddy have been messing around with. We can’t wait to see all the “Let’s plays” of people getting wrecked by this one!

A hard mode/low HP version of an attack we showed the other week. Every attack, even in normal mode, will have a harder version that the boss will use when she reaches a certain amount of HP.

Even with the place holder ice graphics, this one is pretty self explanatory. On its own it’s rather simple to avoid, but once the boss herself starts moving around it becomes another story!

This attack was suggested by Own over at the forums (thanks buddy!). Once again, this is the normal version. Don’t let the soothing motion fool you, things will get nastier as time progresses!

Besides boss stuff, Vilya has kept working on the second zone of the dungeon. Below is the “Government building”, where a lot of the administrative tasks of Tai Ming gets handled.

Fred has been busy with NPC and cutscene stuff, which will be a common commodity in Tai Ming through out the dungeon!

A new week and – you guessed it – more Tai Ming!

Among the things added to the village last week was an Inn (which pretty much would be Grindea’s first real Inn – at least in Story Mode)!

The beginning of a dam (it will also have a “mouth” that will open or close depending on how you use it, but Fred will add that later cause it needs to be animated):

And an… ape house(?!) with its surrounding area, which includes some market stands that will sell familiar items:

Fred has also been busy adding NPCs to the village, so here’s a few more:

Lookie! A dog! It’s the very first dog in Grindea!! How exciting as that?

As for Teddy, as you can guess, he has continued working on the boss and added the first area’s background & it’s props to the game! Phew!

Now, on to even more Tai Ming things! See you next week :D

It’s Monday again guys! Did you have a nice week? We sure did! You see, last Wednesday was Fred’s birthday. You didn’t forget to say congrats to him did you? …did you?! ;)

Anyway! When not celebrating Fred’s birthday we spent our time continuing working on Tai Ming. Vilya has now moved on to the second Tai Ming map (wohoo, finally), and also made a few new trees to decorate the areas:

Also, as we promised last time, here’s a sneak peek of the boss prototype Teddy has been working on:

First up (above), a move where she pulls you close to herself, then starts pulling circles of fans closer to herself until you’re forced to take damage unless you find your way out of the circle. Touch the fans and you take damage, so you better watch where you move!

Next up is a variation of the above, but instead of pulling fans closer to her, she keeps a smaller circle surrounding the two of you and moves back and forth. Move with her in order to avoid taking damage!

In this third move, she sends a bunch of homing fans after you in a pattern! You better keep moving or you’re gonna get hurt.

Here’s another version of the move where she pulls you next to her, surrounding the both of you with fans. In this version you have to run around her to avoid the damage (kind of similar to the Power Flower move earlier)!

And of course, what better addition to any Grindea boss than some kind of bullet hell move, right?! We’re still playing around with different patterns, so if you have any other ideas, go ahead and let us know what you’d like to see!

Now, to end this post is another couple of NPCs made by Fred:

What in the world is going on?! Stay tuned to find out :)

Finally, we’ve all completely moved on to Tai Ming!

Vilya continues working on the backgrounds, ending the from-past-to-present transformation of the first map by ruining the exit to the next level:

After that was done, a bunch of small fixes and changes were made:

And now, we can finally start adding all the props to the editor so it’s easier to add them and their colliders to the upcoming maps:

Meanwhile, Fred is creating a ton of NPCs for the village:

…and Teddy is prototyping the first boss! How exciting is that?! We’ll take a look at how that works in next week’s recap! See you then :D

It’s a new week, and time for a new blog post! This week there was another patch, which also is up on the stable beta now. That means those of you who play on Stable can finally experience Mount Bloom and all it’s secrets!

In the newest patch we also added this little fellow to the game:

He’s a traveling merchant which will be in town selling a bunch of new weapons and gear during the festival. If you already played through the festival, you don’t have to worry though! His stock will be added to the other stores in town once he leaves :)

Other than that it’s business as usual: working on Tai Ming! Vilya has continued destroying the background, and soon there’s really not much left to ruin:

It’s time for the Weekly Recap! Wohoo! For those that didn’t know, a new Frontline patch went live last week, which obviously has kept us busy for a while. This one features a bunch of side quests!

If you want to know how many to look for: there are two new rooms with challenges which aren’t triggered by quests – you can do them by simply walking into them and uh… solving what appears before you.

There are also three quests triggered by characters in the cave. As always, we try to be pretty creative with our quests – I think you know by now that there aren’t exactly too many simple fetch quests (though one or two of these might have elements similar to that).

It’s also possible to get the proper achievement (and reward) for catching all Mount Bloom fishes (a proper Angler Fish hat):

And as always, a bunch of new expressions were made for our silly cast (but what is Belmont doing among them?!)

But we haven’t only been working on the patch (or on finding and fixing the bugs that you guys helped us discover after the patch went live), we’ve also worked on Tai Ming. Vilya continues to destroy the first map:

And Fred has spent some time on the annoying monkeys you’ll face up against in the present version of the town (they are still WIP, so beware of stray pixels and missing tails)!

Another week has gone by and we’re continuing work on the upcoming Time Travel temple! Teddy is back in town as well, so there should be a patch up and running before the end of the week, featuring the side quests of Mount Bloom!

Anyway, back in the office Vilya has continued working on the ruining the area around the Barracks, which have seen some neglect over the years as you time travel back and forth:

A while ago we also started working on the second Tai Ming Zone, which will be the actual village part of the area/temple-thingy! For this one, we really want the player to think a bit more. This place is more about exploration and figuring out how to solve the quests than going from point a to point b and doing something mechanically. Instead, the entire map becomes your puzzle, where you have to change certain things in the past to unlock a way forward in the present.

Of course, when in the present we’ve thrown in a bunch of encounters and places where you’ll have regular battles as well. After all, this is still supposed to be somewhat temple-y, and the enemies do drop cards..!

In the end, this is what our little layout ended up like! Below is the Past version, where everyone’s still in town, living their everyday life:

And here’s the present version, where things are in ruin, overgrown and forgotten (with roaming enemies!):

Now, this is just an early sketch so things may still change (such as distances, house sizes etc). And obviously the houses and stuff won’t look like they do here, they are all placeholder until the actual graphic for them has been made!

Oh, and speaking of enemies by the way, here’s a couple more animations for one of those you’ll encounter in this area, made by Fred this week:

And finally, a portrait (cause why not):