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!

Way back, before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we used to have a crafting tab in the inventory, from which all your crafting needs were carried out. Things changed, and instead crafting was to be handled at the different shops in town.

Looking back, this was a rather misguided decision, and so we’ll bring crafting back into the menu!

Instead of the old interface used in the shops, we’re using the layout previously found when looking at recipes via your inventory. The tradeoff is that you can’t display as many items at once, but a clear benefit is that much more information is available at first glance!

You can now see what type of item it is, and the exact ingredients required directly in the list. By pressing right or left, you can also cycle through the ingredients to see their description, stats and how many you own. Oh, and if you still prefer to find recipes through the inventory (by selecting an ingredient), you can craft from there as well!

With this change, we’ll also add a feature we’ve promised for a while now, namely the ability to track crafting recipes:

When tracking a recipe, it will appear where you’d normally see your tracked quest, allowing you to see your progress without needing to visit the menu. You can still cycle through your active quests like normal using TAB (or RB/R1 on controllers); the tracked recipe will behave just like another quest.

With this, the shopkeepers will lose their crafting licenses and can only Buy/Sell. Let’s hope they don’t go out of business! :C

This week we’ve kept on working with the Temple of Seasons, adding more rooms and more seasons! Here’s another GIF, from a room with multiple season orbs:

Click to see it animated!

As you can see, depending on what season it is, there will be different obstacles blocking different paths. Will you be able to find your way through the dungeon?! Only time will tell…

In the meanwhile, here’s one of the versions of the lobby, an important room that connects many different parts of the dungeon, that has kept Vilya busy for a while:

Click for full size!

Don’t forget that you can see more of her work (and additional rooms) over at her blog.

New for this week is also that Teddy has started up a tumblr where he will post GIFs of what he’s currently implementing. Go follow that for more animated goodies.

Oh, and you haven’t forgotten Fred’s old tumblr, have you? That’s the place where he posts what he’s working on.

If cold autumn winds are making you wish you could rewind time and go back to the warm embrace of summer, then our Temple of Seasons™ might be just the thing you’re looking for! Simply whack the supplied Summer Orb and watch the landscape transform around you:

It’s animated! Click it!

We had a long back and forth discussion regarding how the seasons would work in the temple, mostly related to whether the Season Orbs would change the season of the entire temple, or just the current room. In the end, we went with having the orbs control the season of their own room!

Both variants could lead to some interesting progression mechanics, but we went with this variant mostly since it would put a slightly less massive workload on poor Vilya and Fred, while also being a bit easier to create puzzle modules for.

For similar reasons, we opted to have separate orbs that summon their corresponding season, rather than one orb that cycled between them, as in A Link to the Past.

Having the entire dungeon sketched out, we feel it has a ton of potential to be really cool when it’s all done!

This week we’ve continued working on the Temple of Seasons. It will be one of the most graphically heavy areas of the game since both enemies and scenery will have three different variations, so our grahpic duo have wasted no time getting started!

Below is one of the early rooms of the temple in all of its autumny glory.

If you missed it a few weeks ago, Vilya have started up a workblog that goes a lot more indepth about the graphical assets she’s making, like the room seen above. Be sure to check it out!

Fred have spent the week finishing up all of the animations for the Summer varation of the Knight enemies we showed off a while ago. The Summer Knight will work as a base for both the Fall and Winter versions. Besides different weapons, each enemy will have their own set of unique moves they will have access to if the area is set to their season.

Above is the Summer Knights special move, a high damaging single target attack with Guard Crush (instantly destroys your shield if not perfect guarded) and a huge knockback.

Besides fancy special attack, the knights will be the first enemy in the game that uses shields. The enemy shields will work similar to player shields in terms that they have their own HP and can break if taking too much damage.

First off, we’d like to remind everyone that the talent system is now live in the Frontline beta! So jump in there and test them out. Some systems have been slightly reworked or extended to facilitate some of the Talent effects, so the potential for amazing bugs is vast! Upon loading an old character, all skill points will auto-refund and adapt to the new system.

Another new addition in this update is the ability to refund skill points! This is something that has been suggested and discussed for a long time now, and it has never been an extremely prioritized topic (partly because of the /respec cheat already in game). With the advent of Talents, however, we decided to test this feature out.

For a fair bit of gold, you can refund a skill point you might have misplaced or began to regret! The cost scales with level (currently 100 gold per level gained), so it should always be a cost that stings at least a bit.

Oh, and something you might’ve noticed just from looking at the screenshot above: we’re removing a charge level from all active spells. There are three reasons behind this.

For one, finding openings for charging up is hard as it is, and will only get harder as you gain more charge levels. Having three charge upgrades instead of four helps a bit in this regard. This is probably the smallest issue, even.

Another reason is that having five different charges makes for a pretty awkward power curve. Preferably, the Silver, Gold and Ultimate charges would all need to be significant upgrades compared to their previous charge level. This meant the Gold charge would have to be “really cool but not too cool since we must add a fifth power level after it”.

What we’ll do now is that you just skip that step, and will get the best version of the skill at level 10 (which will be acquired at character level 19 with the current system).

Finally, we acknowledge that it would probably technically be possible to get the five step power curve to feel alright, but we always have to keep in mind the development time (including testing and balance revisions).

We doubt very much that the previous Gold charge would have added a ton compared to “just” having four charge levels, but it would mean many hours of brain storming, animating, implementation and tuning.

(Please note that we’ve still not implemented the final charge! This will probably come after the next temple is in the game)

In case you missed it, we’ve now updated the Frontline beta to include the Toy Factory! If you decide to play it through, we’d love to hear your thoughts over at the forums, regardless if you liked it all or hated it all!

When you try it out remember to not use overpowered characters (unless you want it to be easy)! Being level 15 or something is fine, but if you’re sporting the best gear in the game and a high level pet, you should probably equip something less powerful, or at least switch to Hard.

With those news out of the way, let’s get our hands dirty with the upcoming Skills & Talents Overhaul!

Talents will be a new kind of passive skills, which the player can level besides the regular active skills that are in the game today. You’ll level these using talent orbs, which you gain one of every time you level.

The intended function of the Talents are to improve the possibility to specialize and help create build- and gameplay diversity, as well as give players opportunities to mitigate weaknesses. For example, there’s a Talent which extends the Perfect Guard window to help players struggling with that, and we’re also implementing Talents that promote using a combination of weapon skills and magic spells by adding bonus effects.

Gameplay wise, the system should help players find a more personal play style, but it will also help improve other aspects of the game. Since most people prefer to switch between no more than 2-3 active skills, there will eventually be a point where additional skill points won’t feel as rewarding as they did early on in the game. With Talents, there will always be something useful to spend your points on, ensuring that each level up gives the player a meaningful choice.

It also opens up for a new kind of quest reward. While we already have a quest which grant a Bronze skill point, due to the problems mentioned above, it isn’t necessarily a cause for celebration for those players who already got their main skills leveled to Silver. A Talent point will nearly always be valuable, making it an “objectively good” reward. It’s also much more interesting than giving just EXP.

To help Talents stay relevant, all Talents will have percentage based effects. That way, regardless if you’re level 10 or level 100, that 10 % MaxHP bonus will be just as relevant.

If you want to check out more details about the Talents we currently have planned, and come with suggestions for new ones, please check out the official forum thread!