As mentioned last week, we’re working full speed on getting the final charges up and running! While we’re not ready to patch them into the game yet, here’s a preview of three of them in action:

Click to view full-size

The Summon Plant gold charge introduces a new type of plant to the bunch. Instead of attacking, it’ll give bonuses to the plants you’ve already summoned (and will be summoned with a number of minion-plants of its own).  

You can only have one of these plants active at the same time, so if you summon it again it’ll move to your new location. However, it’ll bring any plants surrounding it along with it, so it’s perfect for moving plant traps to new strategic places!

Click to view full-size

Piercing Dash, meanwhile, has become both faster and longer, allowing you to dash through enemies and deal damage to them after passing through! For the more advanced players it might also be good to know that this level of Dash is now cancel-able, and canceling mid-dash will allow your next skill to become instantly gold charged.

Time for some epic combos? :)

Click to view full-size

Finally, the Blade Flurry gold charge increases the number of hits and has a 3-hit finisher that deals additional damage!

Now, while the boys have been busy with the skills, Vilya has kept working on improvements for the menu. Here’s the improved Equipment tab:

As you can see, we’re finally introducing style slots for weapons and shields! This is something that has been requested a lot, and since we’re reworking this menu anyway we thought we might as well squeeze it in. As we’d like the Steam Early Access release to happen sooner rather than later, though, we’re not 100% sure the style slots will be implemented before the EA release, but it’s definitely coming soon after, at the very least.

We’re also reworking the Character tab:

Gone is the boring super brown text-only tab, and instead we have a more colorful and actually ID-looking tab for your collector. The Birthday and Starsign will be randomly generated, as will your Collector ID number. Also, the stats you see here are temporary: we’re replacing a few and removing others. Since this isn’t actually implemented yet, there may be small changes here and there, but the overall look should remain.

Next week, Vilya will finally return to doing stuff for the next temple, while Teddy & Fred soldier on with more gold charges!

Hi guys! Another week has gone past, and it’s finally getting warm in Sweden (yay)!
In the office, we’ve been spendin’ time on a bunch of different things. Teddy & Fred are working on the Gold Charge Skills, so we have a bunch of prototypes up and running! They’re still in need of some edits and huge amounts of polish, but we’re getting there.

Vilya kept working on menu edits, and the left side of the menu will officially look like this once it’s been implemented:

A bit less brown, and a bit more graphic heavy, with swirls and decorations added since last week :)

Speaking of graphic heavy, she’s also been repainting the haircuts & polished the various palettes available for them. We had a bunch of issues with the old ones, where skintone pixels were visible through the hair in some styles, and the overall rendering technique wasn’t the best. Also, we found the palettes to be pretty lackluster…

So, that has hopefully been fixed, and should be up and running within the next few patches!

Hairstyle Reworks, Part 1:

Hairstyle Reworks, Part 2:

New Palettes:

(For the palette previews we’ve used different haircuts, so some of the colors might look a bit different than they do when you apply them to the same style!)

Next week (technically, this week) we’ll continue working on the Gold Charges, so hopefully we’ll be able to show you some of that next recap! See you then! :)

Two weeks ago, we showed a bunch of new menu icons. This week, Vilya continues to rework the menu graphics! First up, we have new menu titles, adding a touch of color to the otherwise very brown menu:

Second, we reworked the skill boxes a bit:

With this new look, we hope to tie the appearance of the Skill-tabs together with the Talent counterpart. Also, more graphics & colors, yay!

We’ve also begun reworking the character box, again removing some brown (in the current version, it’s floating in a brown box) and having it stand on its own:

We’ll continue working on this left side of the menu later, literally tying things together a bit more visually, so it’s not just three boxes floating next to eachother!

Now, for something that’s actually already in the game… As of the latest update, we now have actual Steam Achiements! And with some of these achievements, we’ve added new rewards for your character.

Below you can see a selection of these rewards (go get ’em now!):

Lastly, we’re currently thinking of ways to implement the new promo art in our website background. Here’s a mockup of what it could like, though we’re not quite there yet:

So, this week we had the honor of being judges at GGC, or Gotland Game Conference, a local games conference hosted by our school, where the students at the Game Design program showcase their game projects and compete for a set of prizes! It’s great to get a chance to meet fellow game developers, talk about the business and just take a short break.

The games were amazing, as always. We keep saying that each year only gets better, and this time was no exception! Below is a showcase video featuring the games that were competing this year, and most of them were really fun:

The Grand Prize winner was Frog Climber, which was a first year project, so it’ll be interesting to see what the developers come up with next year!

Since no weekly recap would be complete without any sort of Secrets of Grindea update, this time we’re sharing two of Vilya’s portrait WIP videos from her personal YouTube account:

The videos feature future Santa Fae residents and the finished sprites can be viewed below:

Hi guys! I’m gonna keep this blog post brief because we’re in the middle of judging Gotland Game Conference 2015, but I really wanted this update to be on time!

So, as you may have noticed if you played the game in the last few days, we’ve added a “quicklevel”-system to Arcade Mode!

This allows you to quickly level any skills and talents you’ve recently been leveling, without having to browse through the menu to find them all over again. Here’s a GIF showing the difference (click to watch full-sized version):

Other than that, Vilya has kept working on improving the earlier graphics! This time around, she went over the menu icons (old versions on the top, new versions on the bottom):

She also went back and touched up a bunch of portraits, and created this new one:

Fred has kept working on the gold charge animations, focusing on giving the snow buddy some actual animations this week!

 

Hope you guys have had a great week! We have one more day of judging games, then it’s all back to normal. Perhaps we’ll talk a bit about our experience with this year’s GGC in the next update, if any of you are interested in that sort of thing! Until then, see you! :D

Another week has gone past! We updated the Stable Beta on Steam a few days ago, so if you’re a Stable user now’s a good time to play again: plenty of quests and a few new systems has been added for you to play around with~

Now, what have we been up to this week? Our main concern has been Steam Leaderboards for Arcade Mode, which has kept both Vilya and Teddy busy in GUI-making-land:

Now, the highscores will be sorted in 2 different ways. First, how many players were present in the run, which means that single player, 2-player, 3-player and 4-player runs all will have their own highscore entries. You swap between these by pressing up or down (as indicated by the arrows next to the title).

Second, a filter option will let you browse through global scores, friends only, and your own highest score. You swap between these by pressing tab.

These leaderboards haven’t been implemented yet, but they should be in an upcoming patch! What was implemented, though, is the ability to hide your pet:

This function is something that has been on our to-do list for the longest while, and I’m sure a lot of you are happy to finally be able to hide pets that refuse to leave you alone! Go check it out by opening the Pet Menu from your Character tab.

Other than that, Vilya has been cleaning up and improving a few more things in different areas. Among the things she did was adding a bunch of decorations to the balcony in Startington:

As well as transforming this pretty empty area:

…Into something a bit more exciting, featuring decorative snow caves (yay?)!

Our goal with these snow caves was to have the yeti spawn from them, but we aren’t exactly sure if we’ll get around to that or if they’ll simply be decorative in the end.

Lastly, we’ll end the post with some cool animations by Fred, who keeps making gold charges! Here’s the Shadow Clone version:

As we’ve been developing this game, all of us have improved a lot. Today, both the graphical assets and the way we handle things programming wise are much different than they were when we first started out. Because of that, we thought it would be a good idea to have Vilya rework some of the early graphics so they’d fit in better with the later stuff! After all, we want any newcomers who purchase the game after it goes live on Steam Early Access to get the best first impression possible.

So, here are some things she’s been working on this week, in regards to that (most of these updates are actually already live and running in the Frontline beta, so go ahead and check them out):

First up – all houses in Startington have been updated as can be seen above! We’re gonna color correct them a bit in the next patch, making them slightly darker so they won’t pop as much against the background.

Almost all fences in the game have been or will be updated as well. These new ones are, like the houses, basically cleaned up versions with slightly different colors than their old counterparts.

Same goes for the wood! The old versions were kind of green and messy-looking, which has been corrected as of the latest patch.

The well also got a small correction: the wood is a bit cleaner and has been color corrected, and the bucket has been redesigned.

The suspension bridges have been updated as well: cleaner lines, fewer colors, less sickly green hues.

The bridge where the fisherman is had to be updated as well – it simply wasn’t safe for him to stand on such a moldy, worn down old thing with stray pixels everywhere! Now he can feel safe while awaiting his next catch.

As of the latest patch, there’s also a bunch of new items and two new character portraits to be found:

Meanwhile, Fred has been working on finishing up those last Gold Charge Spells! Here’s another one, the earth spike now turned into a giant hand:

The Seasonne patch hit the Frontline beta on Steam on Saturday, and received a patch of hotfixes today! As we’ve talked about in previous blog posts, the patch adds a bunch of content to the Winterland, making it feel more alive. If you haven’t played it yet, you should check it out and tell us what you think!

If you’ve forgotten how to change to the Frontline version, check out this thread.

Santa needs halp!

All the new content gave Vilya a ton of portrait work, so that’s where a good chunk of her efforts have been directed the past week! Here are some of the massive amount of portraits she made:

Meanwhile, Fred has jumped back into creating the animations we’re going to need for all the gold skill charges! Below are all the different casting effects of the Berserker Mode!

 

Soon, the day will come when Teddy shall put all these new skill charges into the game… (but first, he must add Steam achievements and Arcade Mode online leaderboards!)

This week we’ve focused most of our attention on breathing some life into Seasonné, also known as the Winterland. Besides progressing the main quest, there hasn’t been much to do besides bashing Frostlings and Yetis. We’ve tried to change this by adding 4 new side quests, as well as opening up all cave areas for you guys to explore.

We’re aiming to update the Frontline beta during the weekend with the new quests, paired together with some balancing changes to Arcade mode. As always, we would love your feedback on everything and anything so keep your eyes open later during the week!

Beyond Seasonné, Vilya has worked diligently to finish up the last missing portraits for the final cut scenes of the Temple of Seasons. This should (which often means it’s not) be the last of them from this area. Hurray!

She’s also kept up with the Achievement icons from last week:

Fred has had a break from the skills this week and been mainly busy with animations for the new side quests. Below are a few of said animations, including one were Santa brutally dies from eating a Christmas cookie laced with nitroglycerin (or does he??).

And wait… Who are these tiny guys?!

There’s only one way to find out… Finish the quest next weekend! :D

This week, Vilya has spent a lot of her time working on a piece of promotional artwork that we’ll use on Steam (among other places):

Still a bit unsure whether the pillar will look like this in the end – we’ve been playing around with various enemies & player character combinations so that might still change. We also might add additional pillars in the distance of the background.. We’ll see!

We also started doing some work on Steam Achievements! All achievements in the game will be available as achievements on Steam as well, so we had to edit the icons to fit those dimensions:

Fred, in the meanwhile, has kept working on the skills. The Frosty Friend has gone from rowdy teenager to a fully grown snow… Thing.

Other than that, we’re working on finishing up the cutscenes before and after the Temple of Seasons boss, so that’s mostly what Teddy has kept himself busy with. Currently, the game ends rather abruptly after finishing the boss – we want the player to return to the collector’s HQ and get a proper message about not being able to continue the main story to avoid confusion.

Oh, and in the next patch, we’ll add proper screenshots to each of the skills that were missing one in their “more info” tab! Yay for no more “no picture (yet)” messages! :)