The past week we’ve continued our quest to get all the skills into the game. This time, the third and final fire spell joins the fray! Its working name is Flamethrower, and it’s a close ranged, channeled spell which does massive damage to anything in front of you.

Click on the image to view an animated gif!

To use this skill effectively, positioning and timing are very important. You’ll want to be able to hit your enemies with the full channel without getting caught by flanking enemies, or hit by a counterattack in case the enemy is too tough to stunlock!

The skill channel is both shield- and movecancelable, meaning you won’t be stuck if things get dangerous. The uncharged version will cancel if you move, but if you get the Silver Charge at level 5, you can move while channeling, enabling you to easier land the full damage.

Vilya has also been getting back into portrait duty. Here are some of the new remakes, featuring the rival Marino, bandit leader Vilya and her minion Teddy:

The Arena has felt a bit emtpy and dead for a while, so Fred have spiced things up with a live audience! The audience is a single 100×100 animated tile that can be looped seemlesly.

Click on the image to view an animated gif!

Besides animation work, Fred put in a Arcade Mode session on his livestream this Saturday. For anyone intrested in seeing one of the devs getting stomped by Arcade Mode, you can check out the VOD by clicking here!

This week we’re switching back from Arcade Mode again to work on skills!

Do you remember the snow summon called Frosty Friend, which Fred has worked on for some time? At last, the time has come for it to appear inside the game!

Click to view an animated gif!

This is a pretty early prototype, but the foundation works pretty well! As we mentioned a while back, this summon differs from the other two in that it’s a physical participant in the combat, and as such it can take damage as well as deal it. This also means that we must handle how the summon dies, and recovers HP. We’ll definitely have to test and iterate our way to the best solution, but we can share some of the ideas we’re going to try out first.

When the snow creature dies, it will get knocked out from the fight, lying dazed until its owner resurrects it. The resurrection mechanic works just like in multiplayer. That is, you’ll have to stand still beside your pet for four seconds to wake it up. Your pet will regain health automatically in time when it’s out of combat, and become fully healed when you zone. Unsummoning your pet will flag it as out of combat, but it will still take some time to recover health. A knocked out pet cannot be unsummoned.

Skills have been the name of the game in the animation department as well, wrapping up the last animations for the Frosty Friend amongst other things.

The multiplayer implementation of the Arcade Mode is almost complete, and we’ve had a long, sweaty testing session in the “office” today! We could’ve streamed it over at Fred’s Twitch channel, but we didn’t think of that until we were nearly finished. However, we’ll probably test it some more in the coming days and we’ll try to remember to stream it then so everyone can watch us fail miserably at our own game! :D

On the subject of streams, Fred has begun streaming on his previously mentioned channel again! Since he might be streaming pretty often, we won’t be posting the link on Facebook each time,  so we recommend anyone interested in watching him do animation work to follow him on Twitch or us over on Twitter.

Anyway, back to Arcade Mode. As always, we’re making an effort to make multiplayer as interesting as the single player experience. The monster scaling carries over automatically from the Story Mode, but we’re also modifying encounters and room sizes to better accommodate the number of players in the game.

To avoid having players becoming more powerful as an effect of the increased enemy count, the drop rates are adjusted to make it comparable to how much money and loot a single player would’ve received. Speaking of loot, a huge difference in the Arcade Mode compared to the Story Mode is that clients receive their own loot, kind of like how it is in Diablo 3. This is to avoid having a single player accidentally (or intentionally) take all the good loot, and it also leads to a lot greater diversity in how players build!

The resurrection system is also altered, disabling in-combat resurrection completely. Instead, any players that die will automatically revive with 1 HP when a room is cleared! This might seem harsh, but since health is the most valuable resource in the Arcade Mode, having regular resurrection would be very powerful as it constitutes a form of healing.

To round things off, here’s an animation from an upcoming skill with the hugely creative work name “Berserker Mode“!

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?