The past week has mainly been focused on spending time with our families, eating good food and catching up with friends who are home over the holidays. While production have had to take a backseat for a brief moment, we have recharged our batteries and are ready for a new year of hard development. Hopefully, Santa Slime will be bringing a full release of Secrets of Grindea next year instead of lousy beta keys!

With that said, we’ve made some progress even though the holidays have been lurking around everywhere! The temple has steadily been getting a more finished renovation both inside and outside.

Vilya have also managed to squeeze out some card art for the Guardian enemy we showed a few weeks back. Bling-bling at its finest!

All in all, we would like to thank everybody for the support and feedback we have recivied through out this year. We read everything you guys say and take a lot of it to heart, be it good or bad things. If 2013 brings half of the love you’ve showed us during 2012, we will be more than happy. See you on the other side, happy new year!

Christmas is drawing near, and we’ve been putting up Christmas decorations and hunting for presents, but that hasn’t stopped us from at least getting some work done on the game!

The miniboss is coming along nicely. As mentioned in the last recap, he can dash across the stage as an invulnerable ball of light, firing bullets all around him. When in physical form, he’ll fire another pattern the player will need to traverse before being able to punish him!

Even normal mode is a bit tricky…

…but hard mode brings it to 11! 

Hmm… I wonder what he’ll be like in the Arena Challenge! As you can probably tell from the screenshots, the temple is flying high above the ground. Perhaps now the birds will make more sense as an enemy :D

Speaking of enemies, here’s the last regular enemy of the dungeon, the Brawler Bot:

These guys can quickly close the gap between you with the help of a rocket dash, followed by a straight punch to the face! One or two of them is not really a problem, but in numbers they start to surround you. If they get shielded by a blue Guardian Crystal, you might be in some trouble!

This week also marks the sad end of Fred’s tablet, a Bamboo Wacom, previously thought indestructible. RIP Mr. Bamboo :(

The following couple of weeks, the updates might not be all that substantial due to the holidays, but we’ll probably manage to squeeze something in!

This week our work with the dungeon has continued! Fred and Teddy has kept crunching back in Visby, fiddling around with the various mechanics and animations for the enemies in the flying dungeon.

One of their latest creations is this little fellow, a robot that will feature as a mini-boss halfway (or so) through the dungeon!

The robot might not look like much in this form, but he’s a nasty one! He’s been programmed to transform himself into a swarm of magic orbs, beaming across the room while damaging everything in his way. Your only chance to kill him is in the scarce moments when he’s actually still in this physical form! But beware, he might have a surprise in store as you come close as well…

While the boys have been working on that, Vilya has been preparing the rooms in which the enemies will be found. Some of them can be seen here (click to enlarge the pictures):

This it the room that comes just before the boss room. You will begin your journey here and come back to it in the end, after you successfully managed to unlock the door by starting three different machines throughout the dungeon.

This room will house one of the puzzles of the dungeon, which is directly related to a skill you’ll learn here. The skill allows you to beam from one area in a room to another. How it will be done will be explained later – there will also be a visual cue where it is possible.

Expect to see more of the dungeon next week! :3

This week, we’ve finally started working at full speed on the first temple! We’ve got a ton of stuff down, most notably in the enemy department. Three new enemies have been prototyped, and we’re mostly done with the fourth and final normal temple enemy. After that, we’ll start designing the layout of the temple itself!

Here’s a screenshot with the three enemies we’ve made so far:

The enemies in the screenshot are the following:

Pecko (the bird)

The Pecko is a giant bird that has made the temple grounds its home, and is quite merciless when it comes to defending its territory! It’s a tanky, quite mobile enemy with a large attack range thanks to its ability to stretch its neck.

Wisp (the ball)

The Wisp is a small, fast harass unit that fires homing projectiles at players. Trying to fight tougher enemies with Wisp projectiles chasing makes any fight twice as tough, so you’ll want to hunt these things down quickly.

Guardian (the crystal)

The Guardian is a support enemy, which disrupts the battlefield in the enemy’s favor. They can switch between three modes:

Green crystals fire deadly beams between each other, cutting off areas and limiting player maneuverability, purple crystals create gravity fields which slow players down and blue crystals shield other enemy units (except other blue crystals), making them immune to damage until the shield wears off or the blue crystal is destroyed.

To be as effective as possible while crunching out these enemies, Fred made a pilgrimage to Visby and has been crashing at Teddy’s place for the past week! They filmed some of their exploits with Teddy’s crappy mobile camera. As a boon to you guys, we’ve used the clips to create a short “documentary” of the week:

Like we promised last week, it’s time for a new update for the beta! We introduce the bow, the boar enemy, a few small new areas and a lot of small fixes and minor polish.

For you guys who haven’t received a invite yet, this week we are inviting a whooping 70 new testers to join the others in the  quest of ironing out bugs and giving us valuable feedback. Check your inboxes over at Desura to see if you have received an invite.

Besides juicy beta news, production is moving forward. We’ve added the last layer of polish to the Evergrind South area, with flowing water and doses of wild life. Below is a before and after picture of the area.

Before (Click to enlarge)

After (Click to enlarge)

Vilya has begun creating art assets for yet another new area that’s coming up after we finish up the dungeon. With Swedish viking blood running through our veins, we wouldn’t feel at home without a proper winter landscape to collect away in.

Click to Enlarge

Since we finished school we have all spread out all around the place, Vilya even opted to leave Sweden in favor for the Netherlands.

We haven’t had any proper “office time” since we left, which has made a few things harder to design, the dungeon layouts being one of them.
Luckily, this week Fred will be heading out on a little business trip and stay at Teddy’s place to rap up as much “face to face”-needed design as possible. Day 1 is already coming to an end with a good amount of office hours and unhealthy amounts of caffeine. We’ll keep you guys posted on this grand adventure of ours!

Modeling is always an option if the whole “game development”-thing doesn’t work out. 

One of the things we believe make a game more interesting is mini-games. And no game is complete without some good old target practice games! Therefore we have spent some time making such a game for the newly reintroduced bow. This mini-game can be found at the same location you find your bow, in this archer’s cottage just south of Evergrind City:

The archer also works part-time doing wall paintings…

The game is pretty straight forward as of now: You get a limited number of arrows which you can use to hit the various slime boards that pass you by.

You score more points depending on which color slime you hit, with the blue slimes in the back giving the most points. Of course, they’re also the hardest to hit – not only do they get covered by the two rows closer to you, they also move a lot faster.

If you’re skilled enough and hit several slimes in a row within a short time frame, you’ll score additional combo points.

We look forward to seeing your high scores in the beta forums once the patch is up and running ;)

Other than that, here are some new hats which might make it to the patch:

Gamex was a total blast! Watching people play was great as always (and a sober reminder that not everyone is as good at video games as our beta testers), and we were even lucky enough to meet some fans (and gain some new ones)! Thanks to everyone who showed up :)

This past week, we’ve been a bit all over the place, fixing some details we noticed people having trouble with at Gamex, sketching up some of the final charge skills, and so forth. The coming couple of weeks, we’re going to focus on getting everything done on the two new areas so we can finally patch that in and let our beta testers sink their teeth in it!

One of the major things we’ve worked on is updating the gamepad support to how the game has evolved. The game actually started out with proper gamepad support, but after some major changes to the gameplay it fell behind and needed an overhaul to catch up.

When playing with a keyboard, you assign hotkeys for your spells and use those. There are not quite as many buttons on a gamepad as there is on a keyboard though, so we needed a different solution than just mapping the skills to one button each. Instead, we use the left and right triggers to switch between skill sets. This way, the four buttons (A, B, X and Y on an Xbox-controller) effectively become twelve!

The screen above depicts the equipment screen when using a gamepad. Instead of two rows, the quickslots are now separated into three groups: no trigger, left trigger and right trigger. In the example, we’ve separated the potions to use its own group, accessed with the right trigger.

When holding down a trigger in game, the HUD changes accordingly. Below is a depiction on how it changes, based on the setup we had in the screenshot above. The order is Default (no trigger), Left Trigger, and Right Trigger.

The game will automatically detect what input method you’re currently using, and switch the GUI and help texts to match it. You can swap between gamepad and keyboard as you please!

To round things off, here’s a sneeze animation for the cowboy from last week (working bare chested has its drawbacks) as well as a few cards dropped from enemies in the Pumpkin Woods! From left to right: Jumpkin, Ghosty and Lantern Jack!

After a few hectic days at Gamex, we would like to thank everybody who played the game, gave us feedback or just stopped by to talk to us. It was a blast as always seeing people play the game for the first time. Hopefully, we’ll be back again next year with a version near completion.

Even though we’ve had a pretty busy week, production never stops!

Vilya has begun working on graphical assets for our very first dungeon in the game, which is kind of super exciting! There’s still some other things we must rap up before we can start actually designing the dungeon it self, but we’ll get there soon enough.

In short (and without spoiling too much, but still spoiling) the first dungeon is a ancient military base, driven by magic technology. It is inhabited by strange military machines designed purely for combat. Since Grindea has been at peace for a long time, what the Ancients needed a military base for is somewhat of a mystery. A mystery for you to solve!

We did some experimenting with the colors and lighting before settling on somewhat of a darker tone.

The first version, above, which we discarded shortly after.

Second version, which we liked better! With enemy sketches and character added for effect.

We felt the second both fit the theme better, as well as helping the enemies stand out from the background. Of course, we still wanted it to feel like both the enemies and the environment belong together. Therefore we chose to use magical energy details in both the backdrop as well as the enemies themselves, to connect the two. Once again, we did some minor variations of the color of the energy, to help separate the two even further.

Besides the temple, Fred has done some NPC animations, as well as wrapping up the level 5 version of the Fireball spell.

Since we started posting updates (almost a year ago now, wow!) we have received a lot of suggestions and requests, which is awesome! Today we’re gonna address two of the things that has been brought up quite a bit.

First, we’ve often gotten requests to include a long-ranged weapon: most often a bow. And so, this week we have finally started experimenting with bringing the bow back into the game!

For various reasons we cut it out for a long while, but now we’re almost ready to have it reintroduced. This time cooler and better than ever! However, it has limited ammo and won’t include any skills of its own: instead you can upgrade it once in a while throughout the game. Currently you may equip and use the bow in the same way you do skills, through quickslots!

Fred has also been working on improving the graphics and the overall feel of wielding it, and we’re quite impressed. Take a look at this:

The second thing we’d like to address is casting spells or skills.

As some of you may know, we have a cast system in which you hold down a button until you’re ready to release the spell; the longer you charge, the better attack. However, you haven’t been able to move while casting, which is something that has caused a bit of complaints both from beta testers and people watching our videos.

After some consideration we did realize that it is a little limiting: it often forces you to wait for enemies to get in position, or you have to instantly burn off a low level spell to get away from damage..

So to solve this: you can now walk around while casting! Yay!

We hope you guys like these improvements as per your requests, and as a bonus, have these cards that Vilya has been working on! Until next time~

One of the more popular requests in the beta has been more difficult content. The Arena Challenges stopped most players in their tracks (for a while), but the main adventure is tuned to be what we can best be described as “pretty challenging for the average gamer”. In other words, not very challenging for the hardcore crowd!

To cater to players on the masochistic side of the spectrum, we’ve added hard mode.

Since the enemies already scale quite extensively in multiplayer, we had a pretty good foundation to build on when adding this feature. In hard mode, nearly everything has been tuned at least slightly to make enemies more of a menace.

Apart from the basic/boring buff of slightly more HP (30 % for normal enemies), they also hit harder, move faster and have less glaring weaknesses. On normal, mastering perfect guard was an optional thing. On hard, enemies will make short work of your shield without it. Here’s a couple of examples to illustrate how the game changes quite a bit:

Exhibit A: Halloweeds have always been a terror on the battlefield, but at least you used to run faster than they could dig. Now if you turn your back on them, they will chase you down (and kill you). They also have half as long delay between attacks.

Exhibit B: Giga Slime (both versions) jumps quicker, the slow effect when stepping in his slime trails is twice as strong, the slow slime doesn’t disappear, he can use his hammer more frequently and its startup has been heavily reduced.

For now, personal satisfaction is the only reason to play on hard. It’s for the players that tend to get bored unless they must remain focused at all times to escape death.

Vilya has been busy creating the illustrations for all our enemy cards! Here’s previews of the Bloomo Card and the Scarecrow Card:

Fred has set up his computer for streaming, and last Friday he took it out for a spin!

Here’s a VOD of his legendary first stream, and below is the result from when he was sketching enemies for the Flying Temple:

Fred will announce on Twitter and Facebook when any future streams go live, so keep an eye out for the continuation of his streaming/DJ career!