During the past week, the Roguelike Mode has continued to get some development love, and we’re out for some feedback once again! We’ve been discussing and implementing persistency of the Roguelike, and come up with a little town called Arcadia.

Small beginnings!

The idea behind Arcadia is to give an anchor point between your runs. In the screenshot is a basic version of the town, but as you progress through the mode you’ll unlock town improvements, both functional and purely cosmetical. Let’s break the major features down:

Essence of Grindea

Essence is a roguelike only currency used within Arcadia. You’ll find it as rare drops from monsters and bosses, as well as rewards for quests, accomplishments and at the end of runs. Needless to say, all essence collected will go into a pool that’s not limited to a single character!

Perks

Perks are tiny advantages you can unlock and equip to boost your chances. While we’re planning to add quite a bunch of these, you can only have three equipped at one time! Examples of perks are starting items, a small sum of money, a skill point, slightly better drop rates, and so forth. In the screenshot, I’ve equipped a perk letting me start with a Squire’s Sword instead of the Wooden Sword, giving me a slight early game edge!

Quests and Achievements

Quests work a bit differently from the regular game. You can only have one quest active at a time, but you can change and remove the active quest whenever you want. While a quest is active, the roguelike mode is changed in some way. For example, if a quest NPC asks you to “defeat the Pumpking in Pumpkin Woods”, a Pumpking (it doesn’t really exist – yet) will spawn as a boss or a challenge. Perhaps a quest is a challenge to reach a certain floor with no healing whatsoever, disabling healing in runs as long as the quest is active! Quests will never make a run easier, so you can’t use them to unfairly boost your score.

Achievements also exist in the story mode, but as with quests they work a bit differently. While they are character based there, in the roguelike mode they carry over between runs and give rewards relevant to the roguelike. An achievement might be to reach certain floors without taking damage, beating high score thresholds, or completing difficult challenges.

Transferable Items

Transferable Items are things you unlock which can then be redeemed by your characters in story mode! This will probably mainly feature cosmetic items — especially viable with the new style slots — but we could technically also have genuinely powerful equipment transfers with level restrictions.

Please let us know what you think, and don’t hesitate to share your ideas!

No weekly recap is complete without some moving graphics from Fred, so to tie the topic together, here’s a new level up effect for when a player… yeah.

PS: We made the Slime Hammer wobble <3

This week we decided to backtrack and polish parts of the story mode in preparation for a future demo! Our main focus has been to tweak smaller things here and there as well as fixing bugs, but we’ve also been adding some new features such as these long awaited style slots:

The idea behind the style slots is to allow players to show off the gear they think look good without sacrificing combat potential. In the screenshot above, I felt the Bandana and Glasses had better stats, but I preferred the visual appearance of my Straw Boater and Blindfold. Style slots give players the best of both worlds!

There’s also a bunch of weapons being added, with a focus on two-handed weapons as they’ve been heavily underrepresented as of late. Below is a simpler version of the Axe from last week, as well as a Spiked Club and the wicked Slime Hammer:

Lastly, we’ve been making a bunch of new items to balance what you can buy in the stores. Here’s a sneak peek of a couple of hats and facegear which you’ll be able to equip in the near future:

Now it’s back business! See you next week :)

This week Fred has been focusing on making the Fae Village come alive in form of tons of flavor animations for the tiny inhabitants. Below are a couple of the happy villagers doing their everyday Fae-chores!

Introducing some new weapons in the game has been long due, so we felt it was time to supply the players with some new slime obliteration tools. Below is a mighty twohanded axe, with much more to come!

 Vilya, on the other hand, has continued working with the cards:

She has also been making background and new GUI elements for the new rogue-like game mode, which is progressing nicely. We’re planning on having every major area featured in the mode, and right now we’re working on the floors representing Pillar Mountains, which is the first area of the story mode:

Click to view in full size!

We’ve mentioned before that we are putting a lot of effort into making our quests and side quests stand out from the regular “Collect X and return here”-formula. While Collect Quests will be present (you are playing as a Collector after all!) they will not appear as frequently as in your average RPG.

The Winterland will be no different, with a bunch of different tasks for the players to handle. One of those tasks involves cleaning up the old Toy Factory and shutting down the Christmas Gift Machine within that has gone berserk!

Staying within the Winterland, Vilya has been hard at work putting together some proper cards for some of the beloved monsters roaming around in the snow!

Finally, we’re also keeping up the effort to gradually bring old stuff up to par. For example, we’ve  reworked how the Teleport Plates gets activated and we’ve given the fireball spell a trail effect, making it feel a bit more fancy:

 BEFORE:

AFTER:

Click to view as animated gifs

Since the Dad character got an all new look last week, Fred took the time to put together a brand new sprite to go with it!

Besides reworking some other older animations in need of touch ups, Fred also went ahead and made graphics for some trap-like hazards we’re adding to the game.

The roots will act as a blockade that players either have to destroy or move around. The spiked version will deal damage if walked into, and the beehive will rapidly spawn Bees until the hive itself is destroyed.

Since your reaction to the rogue-like mode/endless dungeon was so positive, we’ve also put together a little prototype of such a mode to measure the potential. Here’s a screenshot of how it currently looks:

Click to view in full size!

We’ve decided to make it a room-to-room affair, much how it works in The Binding of Isaac, partly for productivity reasons. Basically, each room presents the player with a challenge (usually battling a group of monsters). The drop rates have been adjusted so that interesting items drop more often, and every enemy also have a small chance to drop a random piece of equipment suited to the floor.

In the screenshot, you can also see the thorns showcased earlier in the post. Traps and obstacles are used to avoid having most rooms looking exactly the same.

Another source of variation visible in the screenshot is elite mobs, based on a suggestion by JayneM over at the beta forums. It’s a more streamlined version of the microbosses we talked about a few weeks back. Every monster has a small chance of spawning as an elite enemy, giving them changes to their stats and behavior. The bee (pink aura) in the screenshot moves faster, has more HP and a much shorter wind-up time for its dive attack. The elite version of the Green Slime will leave trails of extremely slowing goo behind when it moves, making the encounter more challenging the longer you leave it alive.

Apart from being significantly stronger, elite mobs have really high drop rates on all their items and gold, while also granting more exp if killed.

Other stuff we’re also considering adding are different types of shops, semi-random puzzles with time limits, challenge rooms, performance based scoring, etc.

If you have any more suggestions for us, don’t hesitate to drop a comment!

This week, the yeti marks the end of enemy design with a slam, and we’ve also made a quick redesign of the main character’s dad:

Apart from asset creation, we’ve also brainstormed quite a bit regarding replayability. The endgame content of Grindea has always been an important part for us, and we want players to have a ton of stuff to strive for after the main story has been completed. One of our endgame features has been something we call Endless Tower, in which players will fight through an seemingly endless amount of rooms filled with different enemy composition. The difficulty increases by each passing room, as does the rewards for completing them.

While discussing this feature, we realized in how many ways this was similar to a classic rogue-like, and began exploring how the idea might be turned into a separate game mode. Players would need to fight through floors consisting of a number of different rooms, each room being filled with enemies, traps, puzzles or other tasks for the players to complete. The floor layouts would be randomly generated each play through, making every session unique.

This mode would also feature permadeath, meaning if you die once your character will be gone forever. You will start every play through with a new level 1 character, so you won’t have to worry about killing of your regular, uber-farmed characters. Since this mode is meant to be played during short sessions we will adjust a lot of the droprates to better fit the fast paced action. Gear and cards will drop a lot more frequently, while the health orbs might be more rare!

There are many good reasons to add this mode. Since we already have the Endless Tower planned and we’ll use the same enemies and environments as the fully hand crafted story mode, adding it will require very little development time while providing a huge boost to the replayability. If we ever decide to open the game up for pre order early-access, it would also be a good way to give early adopters something to entertain themselves with between patches.

If any of you rogue-like fans out there have any additional ideas, feel free to let us know through the comments! We’re always interested in hearing your feedback :)

After a few weeks of vacation and rest, we’ve been itching to get back to work! First of, we would like to thank all of you who played the beta and took time to write your first impressions. We’ve been going over all the feedback and there’s been tons of useful suggestions from everyone. We’ve already decided upon a few big changes, revamping the early parts of the game a bit to make the story more present being one of them. So once again, thank you.

In other work related news!
With just a few animations missing here and there, the Winterland enemies are getting very close to completion. Below are some animations for the Christmas present enemy we showed a while back.

We’ve also decided to add another version of the Christmas present in form of a ranged, green sibling.

We hope you have all enjoyed this summer as much as we have! Stay tuned for more updates and weekly recaps as usual from now on :)

The beta update is up and running! Earlier during the week we sent away a big batch of beta keys to people signed up in our beta thread. If you’ve received a key you will be notified by mail.

We would also like to ask all newly dubbed beta testers to join the beta group and write your first impressions about the game! Your feedback helps us push the game further and keep improving it, so we truly value it. You have received information about how to join the group in the beta invitation mail.

With that said, we are going to focus on going through feedback and maintaining the beta while we take a bit of vacation time while the summer still lingers around here in Sweden. We’re going to recharge out batteries for a short while before we begin our climb towards the next big milestone!

A mega hamburger dinner is a good step one in the recharging process!

Keep having an awesome summer guys!

Hello guys! This week we’ve been busy finishing off the last remaining things in and around the dungeon. There are still some tweaks we’d like to add, but for now the dungeon is complete and ready to be tested!

This means that at long last, it’s time to update the beta! To celebrate this new patch we’re gonna invite a bunch of new people that get to try the game out – hopefully you’re among them! :)

The beta should be uploaded before the end of the week, and invites will be sent shortly after. If you haven’t signed up for beta access yet, be sure to post a message in this thread over at Desura to have a chance of being selected!

Now, we’re also moving on with more stuff for the winter fields which we’ve shown you previously! It won’t be included in this patch, but here’s another sneak peek of what you’ll find there:

Yeti death animation!

A special attack which will freeze you if you’re not careful!

A bunch of random drops

One of the secrets we’re most excited about adding to Grindea are the microbosses!

Microbosses are unique enemies that are usually related to the normal mobs in some way, but are way stronger. A tiny taste of this that’s currently in the beta is the white rabby. 

He might look cute and fluffy, but he’s the #2 cause of death in the game

Most players enjoy the addition of the white rabby, but he’s not quite as interesting as we want most microbosses to be, since he has no extra moves except some tweaked base properties (more mobility, more health, more damage, more stun resistance etc).

During the past week, one of Fred’s tasks has been to create a microboss we hope will be a better example of what we want to achieve: the Frostling Leader!

 

The Frostling Leader will have a moveset inspired by the two regular Frostling monsters, the melee Rogue and the ranged Scoundrel. Our hope is to have it nearly as interesting to fight as a full fledged miniboss, but with way less workload regarding the visual design. A win-win situation if we ever heard of one!