This week, we have finished up one of the last enemy designs for the Winterland. As of now we call them Frostlings!

They are agile little creatures with a taste for mischief. Avoiding to get hit and blocking are preferred when fighting these little trouble makers since they have a habit of stealing gold from Collectors venturing through the Winterland! If they nab some of your cash, you’ll have to whack them with something hard before they escape with your life savings.

These cuties will probably pop up during one of Fred’s streaming sessions in the near future, getting some animation work done together with the rest of the Winterland enemy lineup!

Teddy has spent some time reworking how resetting puzzles work. Instead of our old “instant reset” we’ve implanted a sort of Braid-like system. Besides looking way cooler, this allows players to undo single moves instead of fully resetting the puzzle when caught in a deadlock.

Before:

After:

Click the pictures to view the animated GIFs.

Besides all the secret cool stuff we are currently working on, Fred has been hard at work in the effects workshop. Below is a new animation for when the player receives special items/powers as well as a mixed bag of other effects!

This week, aside from more Winterland animations, Fred has been working on some more equipment! The game had a shortage of shields in particular, so we set out on a quest to rectify that.

Here’s a little video that shows the process of creating a new weapon and a shield:

We’re doing our best to add secondary stats and special effect on equipment of similar tier.

Secondary stats means that even if an armor piece usually raises DEF, and a weapon usually raises ATK, that’s not all they could do. Perhaps the armor is a wizard’s robe raising INT, or maybe it’s cursed and will raise ATK while actually lowering DEF? Conversely, perhaps you could fight with a wrench, which has weaker ATK than a same tier sword, but raises DEF or the recovery speed of your shield.

Special effects on equipment are a bit more advanced than regular stats. For example, the Energy Shield will power up projectiles you bounce back with Perfect Guard, making them deal 50 % more damage. The Crystal Shield has about half the HP of the other shields, but the Perfect Guard damage reduction is 85 % instead of 50 %, making it much more durable if you trust your ability to perfect guard consistently.

The goal is that We don’t want every equipment swap to be based on a quick glance, but to have players select gear suiting their play style.

To end this post we have a little something from Vilya as well: a couple of skill icons!

Some are new, some have been improved. Which has been the overall theme for her work these weeks – making small changes here and there, especially around the dungeon. Next up for her, however, is continuing the cave area we showed a few weeks back, so stay tuned for that!

Hello again and welcome to yet another weekly recap! We’re still fighting on with the dungeon, with Teddy implementing the last things before fine-tuning sessions and multiplayer edits.

Vilya has revisited some of the maps of the dungeon this week as well, improving its overall look and feel. As an example, here’s one of the outdoor maps before the improvements:

And here’s a couple of shots after:

As we’ve been stressing – it’s all in the details, and visual improvements will most likely keep being implemented all over the world of Grindea when there’s time.

When it comes to the animation department, Fred started working on the Yeti enemy we showed a few weeks back. Below are some idle animations created during a streaming session from last night.

Shout out to everyone who tuned in and kept him company, we’re gonna be doing streams a bit more often in the future since Fred has upgraded his 4 year old laptop to one of Teddy’s 4 year old desktops!

If you want to be notified when the stream starts, make sure to subscribe to Fred’s twitch channel here.

In other animation news, there’s also a level 3 version of the Summon Plant spell! As you could probably guess, it has increased range compared to the lower levels, and of course it also deals more damage.

However, perhaps the most important feature is its increased cuteness:

Last but not least, we’re very excited to have received our very first fan art! This piece was made by Crispat87 during the streaming session last night.

Thanks a lot man, we really appreciate it! :D

New week, new area! We decided to venture underground for this one, but we still wanted to keep the lushes nature of an outdoors area. So we simply decided the combine the two, to create Mount Bloom.

Filled with enormous mushrooms and strange vegetation, the cave system of Mount Bloom is one of the oldest and largest in all of Grindea. Home to both hostile creatures  and friendly crystal miners in need of help, Mount Bloom is a true test for even the more experienced collectors. Poisonous spores act as a natural defense for anyone who ventures to deep and some even say the caves used to be nesting grounds for dragons.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally got a proper work station set up! While working on the kitchen table definitely had its perks, it’s nice to have the “office” up and running.

Since Vilya lives all the way down in the Netherworld, we have set up Teddy’s good old Netbook to act as a permanent satellite uplink!

Let’s start off with the game related stuff we can show off! Vilya has, among other things, created the temple entrance for the temple of seasons:

The symbols on the circles signify the different seasons, and we’ve got some mechanics in store for the temple that we hope will be fun to use :)

In other news, Teddy and Fred has gotten their new apartment in order for maximum Grindea grinding! A step in that direction has been to create two coffee tables themed after the game.

Above is a shot taken right after we finished them up

And here they are in their natural habitat (sorry for bad camera :[ )

We haven’t been slacking off, though! As promised, we’ve started working on the temple boss, but we don’t want to show it off just yet. How much do you guys want to see anyway? Are you afraid of spoilers? Do you want us to show everything?

Sometimes we feel that we’re showing off a bit too much, but maybe that’s what you guys following the dev blog want anyways!

It’s time again for our weekly recap – this time we have a bunch of random things, as well as some good news:

For a long while now we’ve had some pretty tough time communicating due to us living in 3 very different parts of Sweden. However, as of last week Fred and Teddy has finally moved back to Gotland and are now roomies – something which we really hope will improve the speed and quality of the production.

Their first mission will be to finish the main boss of the dungeon! We’ve been saving it since it needs a lot of fine tuning and screen pointing, which is cumbersome to do online.

As for the work we’ve done this week, here’s a bunch of random stuff:

Here’s the interior of the treestump previously seen in a screenshot of the Fae village. This is where the Elder Fae gather to keep order in the forest and among their kin.

And while we’re on the topic of Elder Fae, we’ve shown you 3 before, representing Winter, Spring and Summer. Here’s the last one, representing autumn:

In the animation department we have an effect which you’ll see in an upcoming mini-boss fight with the mysterious Phaseman:

There’s also this a scary-but-kind-of-cute enemy roaming the snow lands we’ve been working on lately:

Lastly, we present to you the Ice Spike skill, a spell which we actually completed a very long time ago, but which we haven’t included in the beta as of yet. This skill will make ice spikes appear in the direction you’re casting it.

Click on the image to see the animated gif if it doesn’t play automatically:

This week, we’ve been squeezing in some new magic spells into the game! If you’re a returning reader, you’ve probably seen some graphics of a couple of them.

Click the pictures to view them as animated images!

Here’s a Chain Lightning spell, working pretty much in the classic way! It will hit the closest enemy in front of you (and in range), and will then jump to new enemies until the max amount of jumps has been reached, or there are no more enemies to jump to.

Next is a Meteor spell, which has the same targeting system as the Earth Spike. However, unlike the Earth Spike, there’s a slight delay before it hits, so you need to plan ahead. On the plus side, it hits like a truck (that’s crashing down from the sky)!

Lastly, here’s the Plant Summon in action! Unlike the Cloud, you can summon a bunch of these babies, but they are stationary and can’t follow you around. Use them like traps and bait enemies into them!

Meanwhile in Fairyland, more portraits have been raining in! Here’s the Summer Elder, worried that winter will never end:

And here’s a regular Summer Fae, sharing her elder’s discomfort with the sudden cold snap:

As this week’s parting gift, please accept this little animation of a Brawler Bot waking up from a long, long slumber!

Vilya has kept busy with some more portraits this week. These two sparkling looking fellows below are two of the Fae elders, there are four of them in total. They all represent one season each, can you guess which?

Since we’re starting to have quite a few characters in the game now, we’ve been considering ways to make it visually clear who are more important than others. As a result we’ll most likely go over the portraits once more and make the main characters stand out a bit more in terms of detail and design, and, on the other end, make sure that the lesser characters aren’t too fancy.

While this revamp will probably have to wait until the last stages of development we’re definitely keeping this in mind for our future character designs, and have already done so in regards of the Fae: while the two Fae’s pictured above are important to the storyline and the Fae society in general, there two are not:


How do you feel about us differentiating main character vs filler/sidequest characters this way?

We’ve seen many different methods used in games, all ranging from side characters not having portraits at all, to letting them be extremely drab or even have the same 4-5 portraits reused for all characters that aren’t important to the plot. At the moment we think what we mentioned above is the best way for our game, but we’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!

Fred on the other hand has been busy with some outside projects. Below is the final assignment for an animation course he has been taking the last few months! It’s a bit choppy at times due to some exporting issues from Flash, but we hope you’ll enjoy it in spite of that :)

Be prepared for some glorious Grindea animations when the game is closing in on release!

This week, we’ll take a first glance at a less dangerous part of the Winterland, a yet to be namned village area!

This place is inhabited by the race of Faes. Despite being about as tall as an apple, they play a pretty major role in the world of Grindea.

Below is a screenshot of the village, as well as a portrait and some sprites of its tiny population.

Staying with the winter stuff, Teddy has been adding a bit more flair to the area by putting together some weather effects. No winter area is complete with a proper snow effect after all!

Click the image to view the animation

This week we’ve continued on our different paths. Vilya has continued with the snow area, creating a bunch of fishes for you to catch:

There’s also two more portraits to see:

Can you guess who they are..? ;)

Next up for Vilya is making a new village, hidden among the snowy trees with some quite interesting inhabitants… More on that later!

Fred, on the other hand, has started on something new: more skills! We want all skills in the game to be unlocked on level one – and we still have a long way to go before that’s achieved – but as of this week we’re a little closer!

Here’s the new skills:

This skill is part of the fire tree and calls forth a flaming meteor from the skies and deal aoe damage.

Here’s a second earth skill with whom you’ll summon plants that will help you fight!

We’ve also sent out requests to our sound designers for more sound effects so that we can get that promised video rolling as soon as possible. How long it takes largely depends on how long it takes before we receive the sounds though, so hang in there!