The Steam Early Access launch draws closer! Either today or tomorrow we’ll patch the gold charges into the game, and once they’ve been tested and polished (certain visual elements are still missing) I think we’re good to go :D

SO, once the game is patched we ask all Frontline users to help us bug test these babies! Perhaps it’s time to try out a completely new build? :)

In the meanwhile, here’s a few GIFs featuring gold charges that will be available in the patch once it goes live:

Click to view full size!

First up is Frosty Friend! He’s certainly gotten bigger, and as of the next patch, you can give him commands!

He starts out with a defensive stance which increases his DEF and regenerates HP slowly if he’s out of combat, the silver charge unlocks a DPS boosting skill that lasts a few seconds, and the gold charge has an AoE slam attack (pictured above)! :)

Click to view full size!

Here’s the Heroic Slam! The animation has gotten a bit more elaborate, as you can see, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same old skill, but with increased damage output!

Click to view full size!
The Meteor has increased in size, and also leaves behind flames that burn enemies passing through!

Click to view full size!

Finally, the Cloud Strike, aka the summoned cloud! He’s as happy as ever, striking left and right with his fearsome thunder. Other than being bigger and meaner, he also has a chain lightning effect on certain attacks :)

We haven’t stopped working on the next temple either! Here are some new backgrounds and character portraits that Vilya has been working on:

Once the patch goes live we’ll make a post on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, details will be found over at the Patch Notes part of our forums :)

The work on the Gold Charges continues! There are now prototypes available for all skills, but a lot of them still need to have their animations polished so we’ll save showing those off for later. The Whirlslash gold charge has been more or less finished up though, and here you can see a gif of what that looks like in action:

Click to view full size!

You guessed it! Once you unlock the Gold charge, you can now move while using it! Pretty epic, no? The damage might be sliiightly unbalanced in this GIF tho.. ;)

Vilya has returned to working on the next Temple area, which in reality is more of a village. That means the future will hold lots of houses! Here’s the interior of two, with progress videos to go with them:

Click to view full size!

Click to view full size!

Now, no village is complete without people that live there, right? Here’s a couple of portraits of people that you will be able to meet, one an adventurer exploring the depths of Mt:Bloom, the other an inhabitant of the village itself:

Also, as Teddy’s properly adding the skills into the game engine, it’s not very uncommon for the animations to go through some iterations. The gold charge for the Ice Spike ended up needing some extra pazazz, as the old animation looked a bit to funky on it’s own. Below is a (hopefully) more intimidating ice spike, couple with some stray left over animations for the Frosty Friend!

As mentioned last week, we’re working full speed on getting the final charges up and running! While we’re not ready to patch them into the game yet, here’s a preview of three of them in action:

Click to view full-size

The Summon Plant gold charge introduces a new type of plant to the bunch. Instead of attacking, it’ll give bonuses to the plants you’ve already summoned (and will be summoned with a number of minion-plants of its own).  

You can only have one of these plants active at the same time, so if you summon it again it’ll move to your new location. However, it’ll bring any plants surrounding it along with it, so it’s perfect for moving plant traps to new strategic places!

Click to view full-size

Piercing Dash, meanwhile, has become both faster and longer, allowing you to dash through enemies and deal damage to them after passing through! For the more advanced players it might also be good to know that this level of Dash is now cancel-able, and canceling mid-dash will allow your next skill to become instantly gold charged.

Time for some epic combos? :)

Click to view full-size

Finally, the Blade Flurry gold charge increases the number of hits and has a 3-hit finisher that deals additional damage!

Now, while the boys have been busy with the skills, Vilya has kept working on improvements for the menu. Here’s the improved Equipment tab:

As you can see, we’re finally introducing style slots for weapons and shields! This is something that has been requested a lot, and since we’re reworking this menu anyway we thought we might as well squeeze it in. As we’d like the Steam Early Access release to happen sooner rather than later, though, we’re not 100% sure the style slots will be implemented before the EA release, but it’s definitely coming soon after, at the very least.

We’re also reworking the Character tab:

Gone is the boring super brown text-only tab, and instead we have a more colorful and actually ID-looking tab for your collector. The Birthday and Starsign will be randomly generated, as will your Collector ID number. Also, the stats you see here are temporary: we’re replacing a few and removing others. Since this isn’t actually implemented yet, there may be small changes here and there, but the overall look should remain.

Next week, Vilya will finally return to doing stuff for the next temple, while Teddy & Fred soldier on with more gold charges!

Hi guys! Another week has gone past, and it’s finally getting warm in Sweden (yay)!
In the office, we’ve been spendin’ time on a bunch of different things. Teddy & Fred are working on the Gold Charge Skills, so we have a bunch of prototypes up and running! They’re still in need of some edits and huge amounts of polish, but we’re getting there.

Vilya kept working on menu edits, and the left side of the menu will officially look like this once it’s been implemented:

A bit less brown, and a bit more graphic heavy, with swirls and decorations added since last week :)

Speaking of graphic heavy, she’s also been repainting the haircuts & polished the various palettes available for them. We had a bunch of issues with the old ones, where skintone pixels were visible through the hair in some styles, and the overall rendering technique wasn’t the best. Also, we found the palettes to be pretty lackluster…

So, that has hopefully been fixed, and should be up and running within the next few patches!

Hairstyle Reworks, Part 1:

Hairstyle Reworks, Part 2:

New Palettes:

(For the palette previews we’ve used different haircuts, so some of the colors might look a bit different than they do when you apply them to the same style!)

Next week (technically, this week) we’ll continue working on the Gold Charges, so hopefully we’ll be able to show you some of that next recap! See you then! :)

Two weeks ago, we showed a bunch of new menu icons. This week, Vilya continues to rework the menu graphics! First up, we have new menu titles, adding a touch of color to the otherwise very brown menu:

Second, we reworked the skill boxes a bit:

With this new look, we hope to tie the appearance of the Skill-tabs together with the Talent counterpart. Also, more graphics & colors, yay!

We’ve also begun reworking the character box, again removing some brown (in the current version, it’s floating in a brown box) and having it stand on its own:

We’ll continue working on this left side of the menu later, literally tying things together a bit more visually, so it’s not just three boxes floating next to eachother!

Now, for something that’s actually already in the game… As of the latest update, we now have actual Steam Achiements! And with some of these achievements, we’ve added new rewards for your character.

Below you can see a selection of these rewards (go get ’em now!):

Lastly, we’re currently thinking of ways to implement the new promo art in our website background. Here’s a mockup of what it could like, though we’re not quite there yet:

So, this week we had the honor of being judges at GGC, or Gotland Game Conference, a local games conference hosted by our school, where the students at the Game Design program showcase their game projects and compete for a set of prizes! It’s great to get a chance to meet fellow game developers, talk about the business and just take a short break.

The games were amazing, as always. We keep saying that each year only gets better, and this time was no exception! Below is a showcase video featuring the games that were competing this year, and most of them were really fun:

The Grand Prize winner was Frog Climber, which was a first year project, so it’ll be interesting to see what the developers come up with next year!

Since no weekly recap would be complete without any sort of Secrets of Grindea update, this time we’re sharing two of Vilya’s portrait WIP videos from her personal YouTube account:

The videos feature future Santa Fae residents and the finished sprites can be viewed below:

Hi guys! I’m gonna keep this blog post brief because we’re in the middle of judging Gotland Game Conference 2015, but I really wanted this update to be on time!

So, as you may have noticed if you played the game in the last few days, we’ve added a “quicklevel”-system to Arcade Mode!

This allows you to quickly level any skills and talents you’ve recently been leveling, without having to browse through the menu to find them all over again. Here’s a GIF showing the difference (click to watch full-sized version):

Other than that, Vilya has kept working on improving the earlier graphics! This time around, she went over the menu icons (old versions on the top, new versions on the bottom):

She also went back and touched up a bunch of portraits, and created this new one:

Fred has kept working on the gold charge animations, focusing on giving the snow buddy some actual animations this week!

 

Hope you guys have had a great week! We have one more day of judging games, then it’s all back to normal. Perhaps we’ll talk a bit about our experience with this year’s GGC in the next update, if any of you are interested in that sort of thing! Until then, see you! :D

Another week has gone past! We updated the Stable Beta on Steam a few days ago, so if you’re a Stable user now’s a good time to play again: plenty of quests and a few new systems has been added for you to play around with~

Now, what have we been up to this week? Our main concern has been Steam Leaderboards for Arcade Mode, which has kept both Vilya and Teddy busy in GUI-making-land:

Now, the highscores will be sorted in 2 different ways. First, how many players were present in the run, which means that single player, 2-player, 3-player and 4-player runs all will have their own highscore entries. You swap between these by pressing up or down (as indicated by the arrows next to the title).

Second, a filter option will let you browse through global scores, friends only, and your own highest score. You swap between these by pressing tab.

These leaderboards haven’t been implemented yet, but they should be in an upcoming patch! What was implemented, though, is the ability to hide your pet:

This function is something that has been on our to-do list for the longest while, and I’m sure a lot of you are happy to finally be able to hide pets that refuse to leave you alone! Go check it out by opening the Pet Menu from your Character tab.

Other than that, Vilya has been cleaning up and improving a few more things in different areas. Among the things she did was adding a bunch of decorations to the balcony in Startington:

As well as transforming this pretty empty area:

…Into something a bit more exciting, featuring decorative snow caves (yay?)!

Our goal with these snow caves was to have the yeti spawn from them, but we aren’t exactly sure if we’ll get around to that or if they’ll simply be decorative in the end.

Lastly, we’ll end the post with some cool animations by Fred, who keeps making gold charges! Here’s the Shadow Clone version:

As we’ve been developing this game, all of us have improved a lot. Today, both the graphical assets and the way we handle things programming wise are much different than they were when we first started out. Because of that, we thought it would be a good idea to have Vilya rework some of the early graphics so they’d fit in better with the later stuff! After all, we want any newcomers who purchase the game after it goes live on Steam Early Access to get the best first impression possible.

So, here are some things she’s been working on this week, in regards to that (most of these updates are actually already live and running in the Frontline beta, so go ahead and check them out):

First up – all houses in Startington have been updated as can be seen above! We’re gonna color correct them a bit in the next patch, making them slightly darker so they won’t pop as much against the background.

Almost all fences in the game have been or will be updated as well. These new ones are, like the houses, basically cleaned up versions with slightly different colors than their old counterparts.

Same goes for the wood! The old versions were kind of green and messy-looking, which has been corrected as of the latest patch.

The well also got a small correction: the wood is a bit cleaner and has been color corrected, and the bucket has been redesigned.

The suspension bridges have been updated as well: cleaner lines, fewer colors, less sickly green hues.

The bridge where the fisherman is had to be updated as well – it simply wasn’t safe for him to stand on such a moldy, worn down old thing with stray pixels everywhere! Now he can feel safe while awaiting his next catch.

As of the latest patch, there’s also a bunch of new items and two new character portraits to be found:

Meanwhile, Fred has been working on finishing up those last Gold Charge Spells! Here’s another one, the earth spike now turned into a giant hand:

The Seasonne patch hit the Frontline beta on Steam on Saturday, and received a patch of hotfixes today! As we’ve talked about in previous blog posts, the patch adds a bunch of content to the Winterland, making it feel more alive. If you haven’t played it yet, you should check it out and tell us what you think!

If you’ve forgotten how to change to the Frontline version, check out this thread.

Santa needs halp!

All the new content gave Vilya a ton of portrait work, so that’s where a good chunk of her efforts have been directed the past week! Here are some of the massive amount of portraits she made:

Meanwhile, Fred has jumped back into creating the animations we’re going to need for all the gold skill charges! Below are all the different casting effects of the Berserker Mode!

 

Soon, the day will come when Teddy shall put all these new skill charges into the game… (but first, he must add Steam achievements and Arcade Mode online leaderboards!)