This week, the Winterland has kept getting attention and kept growing. We have tried our best to make sure that there are lots of interesting landmarks and quests to be found through out the area, even more so then in the Halloween Forest. Without spoiling too much, here’s a screen of a somewhat recognizable sled!

Fred is still focusing on the first temple, this week mainly containing of cleaning up enemy animations.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally found an apartment  to set up base in. We’ll dig more into detail about it when the big moving date arrives, but in short it will make problem solving and fine tuning much easier as well as increasing our work pace!

Being more or less done with the backdrops and decorations for the temple, Vilya has gone into snowstorm overdrive to finalize the look of our winter region! We’re really pleased with both the look and the layout of the areas, and we’re confident that we can fill them with some pretty interesting content. Players will be able  to reach the winterland after completing the first dungeon.

Meanwhile, Fred is making some finishing touches on the dungeon polish by creating unique death animations for most of the enemies!

Next week will follow in the same snowy footprints, don’t forget your hats!

This week we have focused on adding those small details that tend to make an area feel more alive. Often it’s not the way you make the biggest or most important sprites that makes an area nice, it’s in how you decorate and add details. Here’s some examples of the improvements we made:

Here’s another example, where we did not only add decorations, but also changed the layout quite a bit:

In this room we planned to block the way up the stairs to a key until you solve a puzzle using the machine to the right. However, as we thought about it we realized it would probably be cooler if solving the puzzle itself was enough to unlock the door. Therefore we made the room smaller before redecorating it to look a bit more interesting.

Lastle, here’s an animated gif of what the walls will look like in the game:

We’re really excited about how the dungeon is coming together, and we hope you guys will like it as well.

As we’re writing this we’re also well on our way of refining a specific part of the dungeon where we plan on recording that video we talked about in the previous post. Hopefully we’ll be able to include it in one of the coming recaps!

This week, things have been moving forward at a steady pace. Vilya has continued working away with putting together the dungeon interior as well as wiping together some more card art. Below is the cards for the Brawler bot and the Wisp, both enemies of our first dungeon.

Fred is back in the groove after fighting off school work for the last couple of weeks, working away at some heavy boss creating for the dungeon! We’ll probably keep all of the boss details on the down under to give you guys something to look forward and fantasize about, but we promise it will be big, mean and contain a lot of heavy weaponry.

So for the coming few weeks, the updates might be a bit less meaty since both Fred and Teddy will be hammering away at the super secret boss in joined forces. We will try to make it up to you by dishing out a new video (content unknown for now) in the near future, so stay alert!

Every monster needs its card, and minibosses or bosses are no exception! Here are the cards for Phaseman and Giga Slime:

As you can see, they have slightly more extravagant frames than regular cards, and we plan to make their effects a bit more awesome than most normal cards (although not ridiculously overpowered like the RO boss cards). Now you’re all probably thinking “but wait, what if I defeat the boss and don’t get a card? :(”

In order to let the completionists be completionists, we’re adding a Memory Room to the Collector’s HQ!

As you start out, the Memory Room is just a long corridor of empty pedestals, but for every miniboss or boss you defeat, a miniature trophy of it will appear on one of these pedestals. If you ever want to fight that battle again, either for the heck of it or because you want to get the card, you can activate the trophy and relive the battle!

Hopefully, by the time the game is done, there will be a ton of those pedestals to fill!

This week we’re jumping back into the flying dungeon!

We have planned ahead for what to do next, and Vilya started off making a bunch of drops that you’ll find as you slay your way through the area.

All of the items are either equipable, edible or build into something that is. Exactly what they are and what they’re used for is something you’ll have to find out for yourself, though! Can you guess already?

There’s also a hat:

Next week will be spent making cards and the very last few rooms of the dungeon. Hopefully by then Fred has done away with his remaining schoolwork so we’ll see some more animations too! Perhaps we’ll even start on the dungeon boss…

After gaining weight and laziness over the duration of our little break, it’s finally time to start getting back to work.

Vilya’s still trying to keep the spirit of christmas alive by making sprites for our winter area:

There’s christmas trees, snowmen, and lots and lots of snow, as you can see! Of course, no area is complete without hats, so it’s time we started making a few of those as well:

Another piece of development news, which will be very exciting to some, and not-so-exciting to others, is that we’re working on some translation tools! We’ve gotten quite a few offers to have fansub groups translate our game to various languages, and if there are fans out there who want to bring the game to their non-English speaking countrymen, why not let them?

Basically, it’s a set of tools that can be used by anyone to change dialogue (and other texts). You have access to everything you need, like coloring parts of the text, or adding conditional phrases (like having a character say different things depending on character gender, or how many is in your party). By saving it into the game’s language folder, you can then select it in game.

Our hopes are that the tools will be used to make better translations than we’d be able to get even if we hired someone to help us! In their final version, the goal is to have good support for collaboration, with options to merge different language files and keep the best translated lines.

Also, having an approach like this can let players choose between, say, a literal translation by one group and an idiomatic translation by another. Perhaps a fan with a great knack of dialogue writing will even release an improved English version!

What happened to the dungeon? Fear not, it hasn’t been forgotten! We’ll most likely get back to it in the coming week, after discussing how to proceed :)

The past week has mainly been focused on spending time with our families, eating good food and catching up with friends who are home over the holidays. While production have had to take a backseat for a brief moment, we have recharged our batteries and are ready for a new year of hard development. Hopefully, Santa Slime will be bringing a full release of Secrets of Grindea next year instead of lousy beta keys!

With that said, we’ve made some progress even though the holidays have been lurking around everywhere! The temple has steadily been getting a more finished renovation both inside and outside.

Vilya have also managed to squeeze out some card art for the Guardian enemy we showed a few weeks back. Bling-bling at its finest!

All in all, we would like to thank everybody for the support and feedback we have recivied through out this year. We read everything you guys say and take a lot of it to heart, be it good or bad things. If 2013 brings half of the love you’ve showed us during 2012, we will be more than happy. See you on the other side, happy new year!

Although we have gotten some work done this week, there won’t be a regular recap! Instead, we’ll just leave five beta keys lying around!

US680-8BL1X-J9SUF-CU0QH-INFD3
H4MS0-Q173B-F8HRD-FQ5GE-9BDY1
V1OKC-W9NAM-VE26C-47BCE-8LU74
P6H5H-FU063-7C66G-SUC4X-OS2PO
WUJYZ-ZT7YY-UAHPQ-R388Y-J8X6V

If you have a Desura account, you can redeem a key here~

Even though this handout is kind of random, we’d love it if you still treated it as a regular beta invite (that means giving us some feedback)!

Within 24 hours of redeeming the key, you’ll receive a message on Desura with some information about the beta, as well as an invite to a hidden forum on IndieDB where you can give us feedback or bug reports :)

Best of luck, and Happy Holidays!

Christmas is drawing near, and we’ve been putting up Christmas decorations and hunting for presents, but that hasn’t stopped us from at least getting some work done on the game!

The miniboss is coming along nicely. As mentioned in the last recap, he can dash across the stage as an invulnerable ball of light, firing bullets all around him. When in physical form, he’ll fire another pattern the player will need to traverse before being able to punish him!

Even normal mode is a bit tricky…

…but hard mode brings it to 11! 

Hmm… I wonder what he’ll be like in the Arena Challenge! As you can probably tell from the screenshots, the temple is flying high above the ground. Perhaps now the birds will make more sense as an enemy :D

Speaking of enemies, here’s the last regular enemy of the dungeon, the Brawler Bot:

These guys can quickly close the gap between you with the help of a rocket dash, followed by a straight punch to the face! One or two of them is not really a problem, but in numbers they start to surround you. If they get shielded by a blue Guardian Crystal, you might be in some trouble!

This week also marks the sad end of Fred’s tablet, a Bamboo Wacom, previously thought indestructible. RIP Mr. Bamboo :(

The following couple of weeks, the updates might not be all that substantial due to the holidays, but we’ll probably manage to squeeze something in!