This week has been all about progress, in more than one way. Not only are we progressing with the game in general, we’ve also been focusing on how you progression in the Roguelike-mode (now officially named Arcade Mode) will affect your character and the town of Arcadia.

We mentioned unlockable town improvements in a previous post, and now we’ve actually put some of them into the game:

Click the image for some animated GIF acion!

Our goal is to make you feel like you’re accomplishing more than just another high score for yourself: you’re actually helping the town expand, and in doing so also unlock new quests and perks for yourself.

Most of these improvements are unlocked simply by playing the arcade mode. When you die, your current score will add itself to a total score which represents all of your game runs combined, and once that hits certain levels you’ll unlock a variety of rewards, including town upgrades:

Every town needs a Mayor, and Arcadia is no different! Just like the town, he evolves the more points you manage to score while playing in Arcade mode.

Now it’s time to pack our bags, as we’re set to go represent the game over at Gamex in just a few days! Teddy and Vilya will be there for the entire event, so please drop by to try the game, chat or complain about the nonexistant release date anytime between Thursday and Sunday (check opening hours at the site).

To find us, look for Uppsala University’s GAME booth, where we’ll be hanging out with some of our old classmates who are also bringing their game projects :)

While there were certainly a bunch of you who liked having HD portraits, the majority seemed to prefer the portraits matching the native in-game resolution. We wanted to keep the new look, though, so Vilya made a down scaled version, which can be seen below. We’re quite happy with how it turned out!

Some of you were concerned about the portrait and sprite not matching each other. Don’t fret! This blonde young guy isn’t your father, but a fellow collector :)

Here’s a little teaser gif from when you beat a floor in the Roguelike! Your performance is graded, and you’re given a large score bonus based on how well you played, and how many rooms you braved. This is for the first floor, which explains the relatively few rooms.

The quest for the flavor animations is an ongoing and seemingly endless task, but Fred keeps hammering away at it. The Collector’s HQ has been the main focus this week as well, but some of the local Evergrind residents have also been given some love.

This week we’ve kept on working on getting things in order – fixing bugs, adjusting levels and implementing the new animations and interfaces.

We’ve also been discussing the portraits (yes, again!). This time around we’re toying with the idea of keeping the high-res versions of the portraits in the game rather than making them more pixelated, which proved quite a challenge when it comes to keeping all of the details.

Nothing has been decided yet as all our options each have their own issues and advantages, but here’s a mockup of what it might look like with the high-res portraits in the game:

(Click image for full size)

What do you guys think? Is it too distracting to have a high-res portrait among the rest of the pixel art, or do you prefer to see the characters in this form, which is more detailed compared to the old portraits?

In the animation department we’ve noticed that the Collectors’ Headquarters have been in grave need of some extra flare for a while and we figured it’s finally time to start correcting that! We really want to give the HQ a busy feel, so Fred have been bashing away at some minor flavor animations to liven up the place:

We’ve also got some news regarding the game outside of our workroom! It seems like we’ll be going to Gamex again this year, so if you’re near Stockholm/Kista at the end of October, be sure to visit us there!

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 :)