Once again, the amazing staff over at Gotland University have invited us to showcase Secrets of Grindea together with a few other student projects. This time we’re heading to Dreamhack Winter 2014, the biggest LAN festival in the entire world and our excitement levels are shooting through the roof.

The doors to Dreamhack will kick open 08.00 this Thursday and close around the same time on Sunday. We’ll be there hanging out more or less the entire time so if you’re in the neighborhood, feel free to come by the  DreamExpo area in Hall B and hang out!

In more game related news, the Hydra mini-boss is getting dangerously close to being finished in terms of programming and graphical assets. Below is a GIF of the third and final Breath Attack, performed by the Fall Hydra.

Click for animation! Once again, the gif is a little slower than how it looks in-game

As can be seen, the Fall Hydras attack differs a chunk or two from its two siblings. Instead of the typical channeling breath attack, the Fall version fires a spore cloud that will stalk players. After a short period of time or if the projectile hits a target the spore cloud will explode and deal damage.

The big curve ball though is the mushrooms spawning on the ground after the cloud bursts. Stepping on the mushroom will cause temporarily blindness which, as you can guess, is not optimal when fighting a three headed hydra! Just as the other floor hazards cause by the Summer and Winter heads, the mushrooms can be removed by changing seasons.

Vilya has been locked up in the furniture workshop, slaving away day and night to give you future interior designers as many options as possible to play around with. Here’s a couple more batches:

See you next week, or this weekend at Dreamhack! :)

The post last week seemed to confuse some of you: have we scrapped the blue and red mini-boss heads and decided to stick the green summer one on top of all three necks?!

Well, of course not! The reason all heads were green in last week’s post was because that head was the one closest to being finished animation-wise, so it has been used as placeholder while we work on the others. We were only joking when we said we’d keep it like that :)

This week, all three heads have their proper graphics, so here’s a new GIF, where the boss looks a bit closer to what it will look like in its finished form (also including the proper background instead of the sketch version):

Click for animation! Again, the gif is a little slower than how it looks in-game

While Fred and Teddy have been working on getting the mini-boss to work as it should, Vilya has continued creating furniture that will be available in the housing part of SoG:

If you wanna see more furniture batches like these, or simply want more updates on the development, you can always head over to her work blog, where she posts Grindea-stuff five days a week :)

This week Vilya has been bringing Teddy’s housing prototype to life, with both a GUI and proper graphics!

Our hopes for the housing system is to provide a little break, create a potential money sink, and give players some multiplayer bragging rights with their rare furniture!

(Boss spoiler alert) Fred has been churning out some graphics for the hydra faces as well. Here’s a gif from the currently very crude prototype, giving a little glimpse of how it’s going to work!

(Note: the gif is animated a bit slower than the real game for some reason)

As you can see from the gif, we’ve decided that all hydras should have the summer head, and also to use cleaner, more stylized backgrounds in white and gray!

All breath attacks will cause some lingering effect on the floor, making the battle more difficult. The winter head, as seen in the gif, will freeze the ground causing players to slip around. The summer head will leave a trail of fire, damaging anyone who walks through it (although unlike the ice blast, players can actually affect where the fire breath will land).

We haven’t decided how autumn will affect the playfield yet, but we’re thinking along the lines of mushrooms, which will pop and release blinding spores if you touch them.

With the core enemies of the dungeon reaching a pretty complete state, we’re moving on to the juicy stuff. Bosses!

The game up to this point has been relatively boss heavy, which is a trend we are aiming to keep going. Designing and creating all the different bosses has definitely been one of the highlights of the production. Hopefully you guys feel the same way about playing them!

The Temple of Season will feature two mini-bosses on top of the “real” Dungeon boss. As with prior bosses, keeping every fight different (but still fun and challenging) has been our main goal when designing them.

Fred spent parts of last week working on the sprites for one of the two mini-bosses, the Season Hydra.

The premise of the fight is that each head will grow stronger whenever it’s matched up with its season. Players will have the ability to change the seasons during the battle and will have to do so on a regular basis to avoid making one of the heads too powerful.

Vilya, on the other hand, has kept making portraits! Here’s a bunch of WIP’s, as well as their finished sprites:

Picking up from last week, the three different types of Wizards are now in the game and working properly. The Wizard is a ranged support type of enemy, with each variation having its own unique special ability. Just like their melee counter-parts, the Wizard can only use their special abilities if the current season matches its color.

Click to see the animated GIF!

We have tried our best to make each Knight/Wizard pair have a set of abilities that work in symbiosis with each other. As seen above the Summer Wizard can imprison players, making it harder to avoid the Knights heavy hitting special attack.

The winter Wizard can summon a Ice Shield around a target monster that will slow and damage players within close range. The shield can be destroyed by shielding, attacking or taking damage from it. Paired together with the agility of the winter Knight, it could turn into a deadly threat!

Last but not least the fall Wizard can summon a bunch of tornados that move around at a seemingly random pattern. Players getting too close will be sent flying into any nearby enemy. The tornados can also fuse with fall Knights performing their Spinning Attack, making them super charged in terms of speed and damage.

Vilya has kept on making portraits! Here’s some of her WIP’s from this week:

And here are the finished sprites:

Fred has been soldiering on with the temple’s basic enemies, finishing up the knights! As we’ve mentioned previously, they would share many similarities, but all have different special attacks they can use if the current season match their color.

The Autumn Knight spins his sword and chases after players
much like Giga Slime’s saw spin!

The Winter Knight dashes through the playfield
akin to the player’s own Piercing Dash-ability

The Summer Knight unleashes a powerful, uninterruptable smash,
breaking shields and dealing tons of damage

Next week we’ll be focusing on the different Season Wizard’s special abilities!

Since Vilya’s now reached a roadblock on the temple rooms (since the few left must be discussed in detail before she can make them), she’s returned to the portrait factory, remaking and revamping!

One of these portraits are the plushie collector in the city. We decided to make her a bit younger when we updated the portrait, as well!

Here’s how she used to look:

And here’s the step-by-step for the new portrait:

Talking about portraits, don’t forget that you can get more in-depth information of Vilya’s work over at her personal blog!

We keep working on the Temple, which is coming alone nicely! Vilya has finished almost all rooms, except for a few which will house special challenges or (mini-) bosses that we need to design a bit more before creating their rooms.

Here’s the last few rooms she made before returning to portrait painting:

Some of these rooms will have animated obstacles and details added by Fred at a later stage, so stay tuned for that!

Teddy, in the meanwhile, has been working on prototyping some of the enemies that you’ll encounter in the temple. Here’s a screen of one such battle in action:

Back from Dreamhack and onto working, we’ve dived right back into the Temple of Seasons!

Vilya is closing in on finishing up all the rooms, so here’s a few of the more recent one she’s been making:

We felt we wanted to try out enemy compositions as soon as possible, so Fred has taken a break from transition animations and returned focus to the enemies!

Here’s a set of animations for the Autumn Wizard:

Just like with the Season Knight we posted a while back, the Season Wizards will come in three different varieties. Just like with the Knights, if the season of the room matches the wizard’s colors, it will gain a powerful special ability!

To combat the enemies of the temple effectively, you’ll have to pay close attention to the season of the enemies you’re fighting, and try to alter the environment to counter it. Sometimes, when you’re fighting enemies of mixed seasons, you’ll just have to pick your poison!

While waiting for the art assets, Teddy has also began tinkering on the housing part of the game! It’s unclear when this will be added to the game proper, but at least the foundation has been laid.

To compensate for all the good looking art, here’s a screenshot of a masterpiece created in-game with the super early prototype:

The Flowering Benches – Teddy van Brugh (2014)

So this weekend we went to Dreamhack Stockholm to exhibit the game (and watch some brilliant esports)! The expo was a blast, and we met a lot of awesome people. It’s always great exhibiting the game and chatting with you guys IRL!

Instead of showing more progress on the Temple of Seasons this week we thought it’d be nice to show some pictures from Dreamhack instead (sorry for the crappy quality, tho):

Hope to see you next time!

We got some pretty exciting news. We’ve been invited by our old school to tag along to Dreamhack Stockholm this coming weekend to showcase our game at the game expo!

This will be the first ever visit to a Dreamhack event for all of us and even though it’s not one of the big ones (Dreamhack Summer & Winter) we are all super pumped to showcase Grindea, talk to people and watch some e-sports! If you are in the neighborhood, drop by and hang out with us!

Anyways, the most common usage for the Season Change Ability will be to open up new paths to explore. For Fred, this means a lot of animations for different obstacles to block the progression for the players.

Most blockades will only be opened during a specific season and closed during the other two. The Phase Shift plate below for example will be blocked by the giant lily pad during the summer and frozen shut during the winter.

And to end this post, here’s a couple of the rooms that Vilya has been working with:

See you next week!