Hello guys!

It’s been almost a week since launch, and what a week it’s been. It’s been so wonderful to read all of your comments and encouragement on finally reaching 1.0. The response has been amazing! So many new reviews and both new and old players coming together to experience the full game.

We’ve gotten some exciting coverage from across the globe as well – most notably in the west PC Gamer wrote an article about the release:

In Japan we were covered by 電ファミニコゲーマー, Automaton Media and several smaller media outlets:

We’ve also been watching a lot of fun and exciting streams from China on BiliBili – we’re so happy to see that the game has appeal accross the borders!

Our very first real review has, fittingly enough, been made by a Swedish gaming site called FZ.se, which gave the game a score of 4 out of 5:

For those of you that missed our launch stream, Fred’s been going through it and is making a couple of “Best of” videos for your entertainment. Below you can watch Teddy and Fred die an awful lot of times while playing Hard Mode live:

Both of them had a lot of fun streaming during the launch and would like to give a special shout-out to everyone who joined the stream and had a laugh with them (especially those of you who have stuck with us for years on end – we love you guys)!

We’ll be sticking around until the end of the week, and after that we’re off for a short break, having a week or two off from work before diving back into New Game+! The blog will be on a short break as well, so I expect the next blog post should be available around April 1st. Until then, please enjoy the game and keep posting your feedback and reviews – we read all of it and will plan accordingly for the next update.

Thank you all once again, we couldn’t have done this without you ❤️

The moment has come:

If you haven’t already, that means you can now purchase the full game on Steam, GOG, Humble or through our website.

Right now Teddy and Fred are hosting a livestream on our store page on Steam as well, so why don’t you go say hi? :D

Thank you once more for all of your support throughout the years. You’re all awesome, and though I’ve said it before I’ll say it again: we couldn’t have done this without you ❤️❤️❤️

…Yeah, you read that right! After 13 years of development, we’re finally we’re able to give you a release date, and one which isn’t even too far off at that. Without further ado, Secrets of Grindea will be released on….

That is, in exactly one week from now. To celebrate this grand occassion, have a look at our brand new release trailer:

Again, while the game will enter 1.0 and be officially released on the 29th, we’ll continue adding some further improvements in post-release updates. However, our hopes are that most of these will be quality of life and visual upgrades that won’t affect the overall experience too much.

Also a reminder that the Snowbacca Tiers will close on Monday the 26th in preparation for the release. This is the last chance to get your hands on those special rewards before they close :)

Thank you all so much for your support on this journey! It has truly meant the world to us.

P.S. For those of you who only play the ‘Stable’ version of the Early Access Beta – as of today the game is now fully playable from start to finish! Go check it out!

Happy New Year everyone!

Have you had a nice holiday? Mine was unfortunatenly cut short very abruptly. On christmas day I got a phone call about the heating system back home breaking down, meaning we had to leave celebrations and go back home to the island to make sure it was taken care of.

We were lucky and unlucky – there’s no fixing the heat pump (it’s 100% dead), but at least we managed to avoid severe water damage through sheer luck as someone was present just as a radiator quite literally exploded and started pumping water into my bedroom.

So, instead of celebrating the holidays with loved ones we’ve spent most of the time talking to the insurance company, documenting damage, trying to get a hold of people to fix things – apparently it’s not easy getting hold of anyone in the middle of the holidays, who would have thought!

We still don’t know how long it will take before the heat pump is replaced or exactly how much it’s gonna cost (probably a heck of a lot), but at least we have some heat (although very expensive one through only electricity for now). It’s safe to say 2023 will start with one massive bill to cover for all of this, and to make matters worse we’ve been hit by a cold and haven’t been able to get back into the office until now.

Unfortunately that means no weekly recap for this first week of the year, but hopefully everyone will be able to be back at the office today (fingers crossed).

Thanks everyone for your continued support!

Hey guys, this is just a quick update from me!

We’re all finally done with covid/the flu, but a little while after getting better I got diagnosed with something called Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. We’re currently guessing it’s because I was recently sick, but nobody really knows why it happens. Anyway, it means that I’m currently having big problems being at the computer as I’m suffering from a lot of vertigo and nausea. I’m currently doing a bunch of exercises that will help me get better quicker – and it’s a lot better already, thankfully – but, just typing these few sentences is almost making me wanna throw up so I’ll try to bring you guys a more detailed update next week, or have Teddy or Fred type one out for you then.

Rest assured, Teddy and Fred are working as I type this so progress is still happening! Just not a lot of updates right now, haha. Thanks again for your continued support, it means the world <3

Hi guys!

Unfortunately there will be no weekly recap this week as I’ve been sick all week with a bad cold! However, I’m all better now so work has resumed and the next weekly recap will be available next week on Monday as usual :)

Thanks for understanding!
– Vilya

As mentioned last week there will be no weekly recap today, but we’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Hope you have a wonderful time out there <3

See you next week for the usual recap! Until then~

Hey guys!

This week has been all over the place. Vilya and Teddy have been out of commission the entire week due to one of their cats becoming sick. They had to leave Gotland and travel to an animal hospital in Stockholm. Vilya’s written a lengthy post about it over at her personal blog, be sure to send her some love.

Because of this we don’t have that much to showcase this week. Fred has been staying behind, acting cat sitter to Vilya and Teddys other cat, while continuing to work on NPCs for Tai Ming.

Besides interacting with the NPCs through out the dungeon, Tai Ming features a pretty hefty amount of cutscenes as well. Below are some animations from one of the scenes we are working on at the moment!

The past couple of weeks have been spent with friends and family, but as of yesterday we are all gathered back on the island again! Today we had a customary work meeting at a local hamburger joint, where we discussed the last stretch of the temple, including the main boss.

Another thing we talked about was the state of the beta update cycles, where we feel we’ve fallen into a pattern of using Frontline as a Stable and Stable as some kind of Super Stable. Thus, we’re going to attempt increasing the update frequency of the Frontline beta, as well as the Stable beta.

The point of the Frontline beta was, after all, to allow users to test things as they were implemented. As a first step towards going back to this, we’re going to patch in the first and second part of the Season Temple sometime during the coming couple of weeks, including the Season Hydra miniboss.

We’ll get back to the proper Weekly Recap format next Monday, when we’ve gotten proper new material to show!

Wow, it’s actually out there! Still far from finished, of course, but out in the garden interacting with the real world (under close supervision).

The impressions have generally been favorable! We’ve gotten some big mentions from streamers and from video game news sites like PC Gamer and Giant Bomb, but what’s making us most happy is the great response from individual fans, and the activity over at the forums! People are reporting bugs in style (good labels, screens/videos) and providing feedback, and also helping each other out which is great to see.

One big worry was that people wouldn’t read up on the game beforehand, and get angry when the Story Mode didn’t have that much content, but you’ve all been very cool about that and spent time doing all the other stuff!

Speaking of other stuff, the Arcade Mode seems to bring a lot of grief and anger, which is great since our Black Ferret Doomsday Device is fueled by our player’s tears! Thanks bees!

In all seriousness, though, Arcade Mode seems to be a very appreciated feature while also being the target of many frustrated tweets and forum posts. So far, though, we’ve found that the difficulty of the mode has a net positive effect on how it’s ultimately perceived! The high difficulty improves the replay value, the satisfaction of getting better and also something for people to talk about. How to beat the Story Mode isn’t exactly something that needs to be explained (for the most part), but the community has yet to defeat Oldman’s Furious Giga Slime!

So, a question that’s come up a few times and we’re sure is on many people’s mind is: how did it all go?

Honestly, we don’t really know as we don’t have any data to compare it to, but we feel it’s gone pretty well so far! We’ve decided to provide full transparency, so here’s some insight into how the sales have been, and what that actually means in terms of paying rent and buying things to eat:

We’ve currently sold 2954 copies of the game over all tiers (4 packs counting as 4 games, of course). Most are simply copies of the game, but quite a lot have been chipping in with some extra funds for the higher tiers. We even have a master collector and a legendary blacksmith lurking about in the forums!

Of these, 2000 were sold the first two days, after which the sales have been slowing down considerably, but we’re still doing fine at roughly 10-15 sales per hour.

Despite the slowdown, we’ve had noticeable bumps when popular streamers or sites have featured us, such as ZiggyD’s stream and a post by PC Gamer. When we simultaneously got featured on Giant Bomb and by this Brazilian dude (you don’t need to know Portuguese to get hyped by this guy), our website went down for an hour. :(

So let’s do some number crunching, giving you insight into what’s actually involved when calculating profits on game sales! We don’t think many people are aware of how this process looks, but it’s actually pretty good to know if you’re interested in how much money people are actually bringing in from their Kickstarters, pre-orders or just sales in general.

We’ve sold for $50,260 before VAT, payment processing and Humble Bundle’s share. VAT differs from place to place. In Sweden, 20 % of the total amount is paid in VAT. Payment processing (Paypal or Amazon) is ~5 % off the transaction. Humble Bundle then takes the very humble cut of 5 % (source). What’s left after this is then wired to our bank.

So, the $50,260 in sales becomes $36,287 paid out. Now, the Swedish state takes over and wants some return on investment for all the free education it’s handed out over the years. On all money we earn to the company, we’ll have to pay employer fees and taxes, which is about 31 % and 33 % respectively. That brings it down to $16775, but we are three people, so in the end, we get $5,592 each. (Formula is SALES * 0,8 * 0,95 * 0,95 * 0,69 * 0,67)

We’re not rich (yet!!) but we’re very happy with those results! Many years as students have taught us how to survive on a low income so that’s quite a bit of money to us.

A handy formula for people who don’t like math is this:

For every copy we sell we’ll all be able to survive for one more hour.

So here’s to hoping the sales stay above one copy per hour! :D