Happy new year guys!

We hope you’ve all had a great Christmas as well as a good start to the new year! The three of us took some needed time off and spent some quality time with friends and family, absorbing energy to make this year as productive as we possibly can. Hopefully all the amazing support you’ve given us during last year will carry over to 2014!

Since we pretty much just landed from the holidays we don’t have much too show this week, but we’ve managed to scramble together something!

We’re doing our best to give each area in the Arcade Mode its own unique challenges, and the Flying Fortress is no different! These little trinkets will take the torch from thorns and beehives at making adventurers’ lives miserable.

The yellow crystal will continuously spawn new random enemies until it’s destroyed, while the red flying thingamajig is part of a bullet hell challenge (a recurring theme during the dungeon in Story Mode)!

Meanwhile in code land… Arcade Mode multiplayer takes its first steps!

Hey all!

This week, we’ve added a couple of new floors to the Arcade Mode, based on the Flying Fortress. This has opened up some interesting enemy combinations, as well as challenges (such as perfect guard training and bullet hell dodging). Here’s a screen of an outside room on the 7th floor:

Apart from that, we’re also trying out an updated way of showing damage numbers. We’ve gotten feedback from many testers that say it’s sometimes a bit difficult to see if you take damage during chaotic fighting because the damage numbers look the same regardless if they come from an enemy or a player.

To mitigate this, we’ve made the color of enemy damage white, and kept the player damage red. Since shield damage used to be gray, we’ve changed those to blue! It’s a bit weird at first when you’re used to the old system, but after a while it feels okay again :P

Fred has been getting into the holiday mood by continuing to animate the frosty friend! Below is a charged up version of the summon. Not as cute, but packs more of a punch!

Howdy neighbor!

This week we’ve continued the effort to fill out all the empty spots in the skill trees (or skill planes), and have two to show off!

The first one is called Dodging Strike, a skill we hope will further increase the nimble feeling of the one handed route. When you press the skill button, you immediately dash backwards, landing in the charge stance several paces away. When you release the button, you will rush forward to your initial position, damaging anything in your way.

Click to view an animated gif!

It doesn’t do much good to just use it randomly and attack enemies that come near though. The base damage is pretty meager, and the cost and charge time for higher levels are both high. However, if you successfully dodge an attack with the backdash, the attack will become empowered. You will deal bonus damage, your charge speed is doubled and the cost for higher charge levels are greatly reduced. In a sense, it’s a bit like the perfect guard.

The second hasn’t been implemented yet, but Fred has animated pretty much everything it needs. It’s called Frosty Friend and is the third and final summoning spell we’ve got planned for the game. It’s also the only summon that physically partake in combat! That is, it will move around fighting enemies, and it can be attacked by enemies as well.

Since it works very differently from the cloud or the plants, we still have to work out some details. For instance, how smart it should be, what kind of control the player should have, its engagement range and, perhaps most importantly, what should happen when the creature is defeated. We’re considering to either give it a set timer for how long it will remain incapacitated, or using the same resurrection system that we have in multiplayer (an ally must stand next to your ghost for 5 seconds).

Needless to say, it’s going to be interesting to implement, and there’s a lot of design details we will have to figure out after we’ve tried it out in game!

Apart from the occasional GUI assets, Vilya has been keeping up with the portrait makeover, giving many of the main story characters an updated look:

As some of you might have noticed, and most of you probably didn’t, we didn’t post any recap last week! The reason was we wanted to wait with urging beta testers to revisit the beta until a hotfix addressing some issues became live at Desura. Due to some system error, this took a whole week, and so it came to pass that we didn’t post the update. Here it is, though!

For those of you who’re in the beta, the Arcade Mode was recently added and is in dire need of first impressions, feedback and bug hunting! We’ve already gotten some good feedback from early bird testers, but we’re eager to get more. To that end, we’ll invite a bunch more people to the beta in a day or so!

Apart from tinkering with the beta update, we’ve also added a brand new two handed skill, which for now goes under the poetic code name Smash!

Click the image for an animated version!

Basically, it’s a powerful swing which deals damage and propels enemies away! The bulk of the damage does not lie in the initial smack, however. Any enemies struck by a launched creature will take double damage, and if a launched enemy hits a wall, it will take a lot of additional damage as well!

In other words, this is a skill which require great care of positioning to use effectively, but if you master it the damage potential is huge. Also, you have to take enemy sizes into consideration. Heavier enemies require a higher charge level to be launched, and will only take the initial damage if you can’t send them flying!

Now that most new GUI elements have been taken care of, Vilya is back in portrait land and has been making portraits for some new characters:

To round things off, here’s a spinning insect which we can’t wait to frustrate players with:

This week we’ve been doing a little bit of everything! One of those things has been to revisit one of the old two handed skills, Whirlslash.

The Whirlslash was supposed to be sort of a physical damage equivalent to the Ice Nova, but due to its slow speed it wasn’t quite as satisfying to use. To rectify this, we’ve reworked the spell to make it near-instant.

Below you can compare the old vs. new Whirlslash (click to see animation):

The Rabby never saw it coming!

In the land of GUI and usability, we’ve added a Quick Equip-function! Now that we’ve played the Arcade Mode quite a bit, the issue of having to go into the menu to equip things has become more apparent. To help against this, we’ve both added Auto Equip for item slots that are not in use, and a little pop-up that appears if you find an item type that’s already equipped!

Below is an example where I had the Wooden Sword equipped, but find a Ruby Rod as a challenge reward. The little window to the right previews the changes in stats (less ATK, much more MATK), and lets me press TAB (or RB/R1 on controllers) to equip it right away!

Click to show animation!

As you might’ve spied in the gif above, the Ruby Rod had a blueish glow underneath. That’s another change we’ve added; rare drops and equipment now has an aura to make it more obvious that something neat has been dropped among the apples and carrots.

Hey guys! First of all, thanks a lot for your feedback in last week’s post. Most of you seem to prefer these weekly updates, so we’ll keep going at them! :3

This week we have been working on a bunch of different things. To begin with, we implemented a high score system for the Arcade Mode. The high score is now available both from the main menu and in the starting town of the Arcade Mode through a bulletin board. The main menu version features your best 10 runs, while the bulletin board focuses on your top 3, as can be seen below:

Apart from recording the name of your character and the score you got, you’ll also be able to see what floor you reached, and how gorgeous your character looked at the time of his or hers untimely demise!

As you may or may not notice, a couple of fonts have changed as well. This is because we’ve been working on an automated system for text embellishment, which enables the game to create fancy looking text at runtime. This will make things a lot easier for those of you who were interested in making translations with the translation tool we built some time back, as you won’t have to make custom graphics!

While Teddy and Vilya have been busy with making Arcade Mode ready for beta testing, Fred has kept working on those cave enemies from last time. This time he brings us the bug walk and idle, as well as some movement for that wormy creature:

Also, this is our 100th weekly recap! Wohoo! Time to celebrate with more work :)

We’re back after an intense week over at Kista, Stockholm where we exhibited SoG at Gamex, the Swedish gaming expo:

If you came by to play our game, thanks a lot! Your comments (and smiling faces) truly mean a lot to us and we had a blast watching you play! :)

It hasn’t been expo all the way this week though! Fred, who stayed at home to watch the cats, have been working on some enemies that will be seen in that old cave system we showed a couple of months ago:

Lastly, we have a question for you.

We’ve been at this weekly update stuff for quite some time now (99 weeks to be exact), and while the format certainly makes an interesting work diary for us, we’re not convinced it’s the best way to inform you guys about the game. It basically boils down to whether it’s better to keep giving you these tiny, bite sized updates, or if you’d rather have less frequent updates but with more substantial and focused posts.

Do you enjoy the glimpses of what we’re currently working on, even when all we can show is a few animations? Or would you rather wait one or a few weeks to have a more meaty post?

This week has been all about progress, in more than one way. Not only are we progressing with the game in general, we’ve also been focusing on how you progression in the Roguelike-mode (now officially named Arcade Mode) will affect your character and the town of Arcadia.

We mentioned unlockable town improvements in a previous post, and now we’ve actually put some of them into the game:

Click the image for some animated GIF acion!

Our goal is to make you feel like you’re accomplishing more than just another high score for yourself: you’re actually helping the town expand, and in doing so also unlock new quests and perks for yourself.

Most of these improvements are unlocked simply by playing the arcade mode. When you die, your current score will add itself to a total score which represents all of your game runs combined, and once that hits certain levels you’ll unlock a variety of rewards, including town upgrades:

Every town needs a Mayor, and Arcadia is no different! Just like the town, he evolves the more points you manage to score while playing in Arcade mode.

Now it’s time to pack our bags, as we’re set to go represent the game over at Gamex in just a few days! Teddy and Vilya will be there for the entire event, so please drop by to try the game, chat or complain about the nonexistant release date anytime between Thursday and Sunday (check opening hours at the site).

To find us, look for Uppsala University’s GAME booth, where we’ll be hanging out with some of our old classmates who are also bringing their game projects :)

While there were certainly a bunch of you who liked having HD portraits, the majority seemed to prefer the portraits matching the native in-game resolution. We wanted to keep the new look, though, so Vilya made a down scaled version, which can be seen below. We’re quite happy with how it turned out!

Some of you were concerned about the portrait and sprite not matching each other. Don’t fret! This blonde young guy isn’t your father, but a fellow collector :)

Here’s a little teaser gif from when you beat a floor in the Roguelike! Your performance is graded, and you’re given a large score bonus based on how well you played, and how many rooms you braved. This is for the first floor, which explains the relatively few rooms.

The quest for the flavor animations is an ongoing and seemingly endless task, but Fred keeps hammering away at it. The Collector’s HQ has been the main focus this week as well, but some of the local Evergrind residents have also been given some love.

This week we’ve kept on working on getting things in order – fixing bugs, adjusting levels and implementing the new animations and interfaces.

We’ve also been discussing the portraits (yes, again!). This time around we’re toying with the idea of keeping the high-res versions of the portraits in the game rather than making them more pixelated, which proved quite a challenge when it comes to keeping all of the details.

Nothing has been decided yet as all our options each have their own issues and advantages, but here’s a mockup of what it might look like with the high-res portraits in the game:

(Click image for full size)

What do you guys think? Is it too distracting to have a high-res portrait among the rest of the pixel art, or do you prefer to see the characters in this form, which is more detailed compared to the old portraits?

In the animation department we’ve noticed that the Collectors’ Headquarters have been in grave need of some extra flare for a while and we figured it’s finally time to start correcting that! We really want to give the HQ a busy feel, so Fred have been bashing away at some minor flavor animations to liven up the place:

We’ve also got some news regarding the game outside of our workroom! It seems like we’ll be going to Gamex again this year, so if you’re near Stockholm/Kista at the end of October, be sure to visit us there!