Another week, another recap! This week, Teddy has finished up the final cutscene of Arcade Mode, adding the new background Vilya made a couple weeks back. He’s also made a bunch of adjustments in the way final boss Zhamla’s plant launches its attacks, and started working on GOG support. Some years ago we decided we’ll be available on GOG as well, and with the release drawing ever closer with every week, it’s time to get that support up and running. Of course, that whole process involves some extra bits of programming such as porting the leaderboards and making sure multiplayer connections work properly.

Vilya has been busy playing through the game and making reports on bugs and other smaller things we need to fix, as well as making some further improvements to two of the puzzle backgrounds in the final dungeon:

We’re still not entirely happy with the second one, so another iteration is sure to follow soon.

As for Fred, he’s finished up the animations for Zhamla’s plant and cloud, and put in a lot of work on a special attack Zhamla makes, that’s a bit similar to how the echoes of madness work in Tai Ming. Here’s a little sneak peek of that:

Now, onwards to another week! :D

Happy new week everyone! Here’s our recap of what happened in Grindea development since last:

Teddy has been working on multiplayer across the final dungeon. There’s been a lot of bug fixes needed, but as of now everything including the final boss should work pretty well when playing with friends!

Vilya has continued working on the final bunch of backgrounds as well as playing through the game to catch all of those last minute fixes and bugs we may need to take a look at. Here’s some progress of one of the puzzle backgrounds, where we’ve added more and more details in several iterations:

She also made a version of the third puzzle background, which will probably be iterated with more details as well:

As for Fred, he’s made a bunch of different animations – the attack and spawn animations of Zhamla’s plant summon and a spawn animation of his version of the cloud, a walk animation for the guards walking downwards and an animation for bag flying out of the player.

Here’s a little sneak peek:

A new week has gone by and more backgrounds have been produced! :)

This time, let’s start off with the various variations of the final Arcade Mode background we showed a first version of last week:

Our favourites here are the bottom right one and bottom mid one – we haven’t quite decided which one to pick yet!

Work on the backgrounds for when you finish the puzzles continue as well. Though we showed a bunch of suggestions last week, we ended up picking a version we didn’t even feature in the post! Here it is:

I also started working on a background for the next puzzle. Here’s my first experiment, as well as a video showing it in action:

We’re going to add some more details to this as well, so it’s not quite final yet. This type of workflow, creating a basic version of something first and adding more details once the first concept has been approved is a very common strategy in game development, one we use a lot as well (as you can tell)! This way we don’t end up wasting too much time on something that will be scrapped anyway, and everyone gets to have a part in suggesting details and improvements.

Another background I’ve been working on is the backdrop for the final battle against Zhamla. For this, we currently have three suggestions:

Our favourite among these is the middle one, though we may end up with a merge between the middle and right ones!

Now, as for Teddy and Fred: Teddy continues working on adding multiplayer to the dungeon. Right now, it should work for the whole elevator trip / boss rush and the puzzle floor, and he’s currently working on making it work in the battle against Dad. There were some issues fitting all of the summons on the elevator in some of the cutscenes if you were a party of four with many summoners, but we’ve managed to find a solution that works alright (essentially hiding the summons during these cutscenes).

Fred’s focus has been making animations for Zhamla and his attacks. The bigger the subject, the more difficult the animations are to get right:

Something that’s just a little bit smaller are these lovely flying beasts that will serve as Zhamlas insect swarm! Here’s a bunch of design iterations, as well as an animation of the finished thing:

Enjoy your week, and let’s keep working! :D

Last week was really busy! Teddy is and will continue to focus full time on getting multiplayer working for the tower and Fred is pumping out new Zhamla animations to get that final battle finished. And as for me – I’ve finally gotten to do some new backgrounds :D

First up, a background for the final scene after you complete Arcade Mode:

We’re going to work out some additional details here though – more on that next week.

One of the final backgrounds for Story Mode has gotten some more details this week as well! This too is a work in progress with more iterations coming, but it’s already a lot better than it was before:

We’ve also been working on some backgrounds for after you complete the puzzles in the tower. Our idea was that once a puzzle is complete, the mirror magic that conjured it up shatters and you’ll be left in either a colorless version of the world, where pieces of it has literally fallen away or a smaller room in the style of the dungeon, suggesting you were in a small closet like space all along rather than the bigger puzzle room. As such, I made a bunch of different suggestions:

We’ll decide which of them to go for this week and let you know in next week’s update! :)

Finally, I’ve started working as Fred’s animation assistant, helping him clean up some unfinished animations he’s been working on. Here’s a little preview of what sort of work that entails:

In the before column, you see there’s a bunch of holes and pixels missing. My job is basically to clean that up and make sure everything looks as it should. With me helping in this way, Fred can focus on getting the key frames right and leave the boring cleanup to me. I’ll continue doing more of this cleanup work this week, which hopefully means we’ll be finished quicker now that we can be two people working on the animations instead of just one :)

After two weeks of recharging our batteries and some strange weeks before that where I had to very suddenly move across the country, it’s me – Vilya – back to bring you new updates! I’m sure you’ll all miss Fred’s amazing summaries, but unfortunately he’s been banished to animation duty for now… :)

This week, let’s discuss what we’ve got left to do and what we’ll be focusing on in the near future:

Though 90% of the final update is done by now, as always it’s the last 10% that take the most time. Polishing cutscene and animation timings, editing sprites and backgrounds, finishing up placeholder animations… We firmly believe that the difference between an average game and a great one is your attention to details, so obviously we wante everything to be perfect (or as perfect as we can possibly make it).

Fred has a very long list of animations to do, so to help avoid too much of a bottleneck situation I’ll be helping him clean up some animations. I’m also going to make a proper background for one of the final scenes in Arcade Mode, play around with some background alternatives for the final battles in Story Mode, and edit a background for one of the later scenes in that mode as well. After that, my main focus will be playing through the final dungeon and the game as a whole to catch any last minute edits we need to make. In particular, there’s one phase of the Zhamla battle we’re not entirely satisfied with yet, but I think we’re close to getting it right.

Fred will start off this week with recording a video of the scenes and animations we need sound effects for in the battle against Dad and send them to our wonderful sound designer Fark. After that he’ll be focusing on the last bunch of Zhamla animations – some that need to be made from scratch and others simply cleaned up. Once we’re 100% done with that we’ll prepare another sound request video for that battle, after which we would have most of the sound effects needed to realease the game.

Teddy will focus on getting the final dungeon multiplayer ready. While most of it is playable in single player, making sure the network side of things work out is a different matter. He’s also been working on some post-end dialogues for various NPCs you can talk to when you start the game after defeating the final boss.

When it comes to post-end content in general, at the moment we’ve decided to add one “easter egg” scene you can come across if you explore the world a bit after finishing the story, though we might end up adding more before all is said and done.

After taking some time to clear our heads, we’re definitely pumped to begin this very last stretch of development for real. Let’s go! :D

Picking up from last week; we are starting to feel very optimistic about our refining of Zhamla’s normal attacks. They are much more fun to deal with, they feel more varied and they’ve solved some of the clarity issues we had before. 

The only downside to all this positivity is that Fred has a bunch of new animations to tackle. Zhamla poses two normal attacks in all three directions (it’s technically four, but the left/right is just a mirrored version of each other) with the ability to finish his attack pattern with either of them. This means Fred needs to create 6 unique “Hey, I’m open for attack now!”-animations to indicate to the player when it’s time to fire back at Zhamla. It might seem a bit excessive but in the end, we feel it will be worth it. Zhamla deserves that extra bit of polish only reserved for the finalist of final bosses!

So, while Fred is busy with that, Teddy has put together some prototypes for some new potential attacks for the King of Collecting!

First up, we have another take on screen-wide fire move. As with most attacks like this one, its main purpose is to give the player a change of pace more than being overly difficult. Since the area of attack is so massive, we want to make sure players have ample time to react properly.

For the other attack, we went with another element: Lightning, with a touch of rain!

The first iteration of the attack both looked and felt a bit overwhelming during the testing, so Teddy did what he does best and cranked it up a notch:

Much better! Once again not the most difficult or threatening attack on its own, but it can easily be combined with other patterns and combos to add a bit more spice where we feel it’s needed.
Visually there’s still more to be desired, Fred has already been tinkering away with some suggestions:

The idea is to have a more pronounced lightning effect in the middle, surrounded by a bunch of smaller bolts. We’ll see how it turns out next week :)   

Back at it again with more Zhamla shenanigans! Last week I mentioned we were tinkering with adding one more sword-based attack to his arsenal and this is the result:

We based this attack on the elite version of Echo of Madness from Tai Ming. On one hand, because it felt like just the type of intimate and Perfect Guard-focused attack we were looking for gameplay-wise and on the other hand, it’s also a nice little visual connection between Zhamla and the Echo’s.

The graphics are still in the very early stages of polish, there’s still some clarity and size issues with all of Zhamla’s shadows bunched together, but nothing that a few coats of animation won’t fix!

Another focus this week has been to give the players more visual feedback for when Zhamla is open to be attacked. Since he is so hectic and agile in his playstyle, we feel it’s more important than usual to make sure players know when they can inflict damage and not get taken by surprise by Zhamla.

Fred whipped up this animation (the above one) as a test for when Zhamla leaves himself vulnerable after one of his normal attacks:

While still rough around the edges, it’s still more than enough to give the intended effect during testing. After some time spent in Teddy’s workshop, here it is in the game:

And another iteration with some more visual feedback added into the mix:

The added effects bring a bit more oomph to it, which I personally like. The flames were put there as a placeholder, but I dunno. It kinda works! We will keep experimenting and pushing it further, but just this simple test feels very promising so far :)

This past week Teddy and Fred have kept tinkering with new attacks and patterns for Zhamla. We are trying to find that sweet spot where Zhamla lives up to his name as King of Collecting, the most powerful collector of all time, while at the same time not trying to overwhelm the player with an endless moveset. It’s a fine line to walk and it’s always tempting to push it even further when you’re working on the final FINAL boss of the game, but we’ll try to not go too overboard. No promises tho 8)

So, one of the new attacks we’ve been working on is screen wide wind inferno-thingy! It’s main intention is to break up the pace a bit and give the player a small amount of breathing room before jumping back into the high intensity of dealing with Zhamla face-to-face.

First up is a video of an early iteration of the attack, trying out to concept and game feel:

And a later iteration with more polished graphics to get a better feel of the cinematic qualities of the attack:

There’s still a lot of tinkering and polish left, but so far, I think it looks pretty sweet!

The second attack we focused in on this week is a Blink Strike. At the moment we’re taking some extra time and care to make sure Zhamla feels fluid and varied when his utilizing his sword. The Blink Strike was an attempt to make him more agile and able to reposition without the need for too many fancy animations.

A video of it’s first iteration:

Aaand a second one with a bit more polish to the graphics:

So far during testing, it’s been doing just what we intended (which is not always the case, yay game design!) and while there are still adjustments to be made, so far so good! We’re still deliberating on and trying out at least one more sword-based attack for Zhamla to have access to. Hopefully, you guys will enjoy what we cook up!

In the last post I mentioned recording a bunch of videos showcasing some of the stuff we’ve done so far with the final battle. Without further ado:


First above, the sequence where Zhamla breaks the room to reveal the sky outside! In this prototype, we still use the red sky, but in the final version we might change it around so a night sky with stars will be revealed instead.

Next up, a little updated sequence with Zhamla’s summons! Here you can see the swap between the red sky and the night sky, as it happens when Frosty Fiend appears:


We’ve also made an updated heal for the sequence where you need to damage Braazlet. We’re still missing the proper HP-bar graphics (which I made last week) in the prototype below, but it should be added soon:


Finally, an assortment of new attacks and patterns:

   
Keep in mind that all of these are still in the prototyping phase and will get polished quite a bit more :)

One of the very final scenes in the game will take place above the blue skies, in space, where Grindea herself has one of her dwellings. We thought a lot about how to do the transition between blue sky and starlit night, and after having tried out a bunch of gradient options, we decided to simply go for an easier (and prettier) solution: clouds!

Once you get high enough, there will be a thick blanket of clouds, and as you emerge above them, there will be different colour clouds and a starlit sky behind them.

Here’s an early sketch, the the corresponding new clouds needed:

And now it’s time to render the background:

After painting a ton of floating stones, it’s now done! Well, at least my part of the work – time for Fred to animate some cards/stars :)

Hey guys! Sorry for this extremely late post, I’ve been in the midst of moving and with things still being pretty chaotic around here, I simply forgot to schedule the draft – oops!

Right now our full focus is on the very final boss battle, against Zhamla. While the prototype for the battle is nearing completion, we still feel like something is lacking. Nothing big, just a lil something extra. Our current focus is playing around with tweaking and/or adding bunch of new attacks, patterns and phases to see what feels good and what doesn’t. Overall though, I think it looks absolutely amazing, and can’t wait to show you guys!

We’ll try to record a bunch of videos over the weekend so you can see some of the juicy stuff in action, but for now, here’s a bunch of Fred’s animations:

As for me, I’ve made a new kind of HP-bar as part of the boss battle against Zhamla! This bar is for Braazlet, who you’ll have to defeat before you’re able to do any real damage to Zhamla himself. In the videos we’ve shown before, we’re using placeholder graphics, so it was definitely time for me to add some proper graphics!