Greenlight

First and foremost, thanks to all of you who voted on us over at our Steam Greenlight page. Thanks to all of you, we just got Secrets of Grindea greenlit and ready to be on Steam as soon as it’s finished!

This week it’s finally been time for us to build a new area! It’s a somewhat traditional forest-y area which houses one new enemy, the bowman’s house and a mysterious mansion…

While it’s not in the game yet (soon!), here’s a WIP preview of what it’ll look like:

Yes, as you might guess that means it’s soon time for the bow to reappear in the game! It won’t have its own skill tree like the traditional weapons, but we hope you’ll like it none the less. We’ll talk more about the bow once it’s actually implemented along with the rest of this area.

As for the new enemy, it’s of course the boar that has made an appearance on this blog before! This time, however, it’s animated – and out to get you!

Can you name the Ragnarok Online inspiration? ;)

Now, back to area-building! With some luck, there might be yet another area available soon after this one.. :>

The past week has been very busy! Apart from fixing bugs and adding requested features, we’ve also implemented a prototype of the pet system, which will be the topic of today’s post!

First off, let’s clarify the difference between summons and pets!

Chilling in Evergrind with both a Cloud summon and a Rabby pet!

A summon is a friendly combatant which is usually created through the use of a skill. Summons will not only cost mana to create, but that mana will remain blocked for as long as the summon stays alive. The popular Cloud is an example of this.

A pet is a companion you can bring with you, which follows you around. It does not join in combat, apart from giving you small stat boosts depending on its level. It costs no mana to keep around. Pets are not acquired through skills, but are caught with baits (or perhaps gained as rewards). An example of a caught pet is the Rabby.

To catch a pet, you’ll first need to find something to lure it with. The bait for attracting Rabbys, for example, is a golden carrot! When you use such an item close to an enemy that’s interested in it, that enemy will engage you and a minigame will ensue!

The minigame is DDR-inspired (how else would you impress someone?), where you must press the corresponding buttons at the right time! If you miss four times, you fail to catch the pet and it will attack you. You won’t lose your lure item, however, so you can try again if you want! By timing the button presses very well (Great or Perfect), the progress bar will gain a small boost and you’ll catch the pet quicker.

If you succeed in the minigame, you’ll catch the pet. If you don’t currently have a pet, it will join you right away. If you’ve already got another pet with you, you’ll get the option to bring the new pet, or keep your old one. The other will be sent to the farm!

The farm is where you keep all of your caught pets. Currently, we haven’t built the farm in-game yet, so we keep the pets inside the Evergrind City Café! The farm is the only place where you can interact with your pets through the action button (otherwise you’d keep talking to your pets all the time when fighting), and it’s also here where you can switch pets if you want to mix it up.

The default pet menu consists of five options:

Feed is how you level up your pet, making it grant better stat boosts (more on this below).

Change Name is just what it sounds like.

Pet Style will change the appearance of your pet into a different variant! For example, Rabbys can have white fur as well.

Bring will make the selected pet your active one, and it will follow you out of the farm (aka Café). Stay will have the opposite effect.

Now, let’s showcase the feed menu!

A good way to spend a lot of the edible stuff you find during your adventure, is to feed it to your pets! Depending on what kind of food you give it, a progress bar corresponding to that attribute will increase. When a progress bar has been completely filled, your pet will level up, and from then on give you a slight bonus in the chosen attribute!

The maximum level a pet can reach is level 10, so the bonuses can’t get infinitely high, but a max leveled pet still has a noticeable effect on the strength of your character.

We’ll also include an option to hide your pet, much like you can hide your headgear. Maybe you want it out of your way when fighting difficult enemies, or perhaps you’re too cool to bring a pet with you but still want the juicy stat bonuses!

That pretty much explains the pet system, so here’s some brief beta info as usual!

The patch containing the pet system, a load of bug fixes and some other changes will hopefully be done in a few days. When it has been approved by Desura and gone live, we’ll proceed with sending out the 3rd batch of invites!

Beta Info

Big thanks to all the people taking part in the beta! An extra shout out to all the guys and gals who took the time to write up feedback for us. It means a ton to us and will really help us make the game as good as it can be.

To all of you who have signed up for the beta but haven’t got the chance to play it yet, hang in there! We will be sending out a batch of new invites when we are ready with a new update for the game. We are working hard on some new features that are in the need of testing, hopefully it will be worth the wait!

Production

As for the production this week, we have done some changes to the Collectors Exam the players must pass during the early parts of the game in order to become a Collector. For those of you who doesn’t know, the exam is divided into a three part trial. Initially the three parts were treasure hunting, puzzling as well as a juicy combat part.

After some feedback and a lot of talking and discussion within the team we decided to change the treasure hunting into a fishing event instead. The main reason for the change was that the fishing system is used much more frequently through out the game, so it made more sense making it a part of the trials. It also streamlined the introduction of the fishing much more for us, something that we have been having headaches over for a while.

The fishing even in action!

Besides reworking and touching up old things, we have made some new progress.  We have started working on a new boss! Two actually, as they are a pair of demon twins. They are an optional encounter, but we are putting just as much love and care into them as the main bosses.

We’ll not dive into detail into the mechanics of how they work since they are still in the prototype stage, so you’ll have to do with some eye candy and the promise of fierce boss battle once it all comes together.

From early design sketches to finished sprites!

And some freshly baked animations!

Beta Info

We’re happy to report that the first week of the beta has worked out really well! Our setup over at Desura/IndieDB is doing its job, and we’ve received lots of great feedback and bug reports!

Our thread where testers post their first impressions is a feedback gold mine, and if you’re a beta tester who’s reading this and haven’t posted there yet, please take a moment to do so!

At the time of writing, we’ve already patched the beta once based on the great community input, and are pushing out a second patch tonight.

Since things went according to plan, we’ll continue on the set track and send out an additional 30 invites as promised! We’ll send them out when the upcoming patch has been uploaded and authorized at Desura, which should hopefully be within a day or so. Again, we’re going to use the IndieDB messaging system, so if you’ve registered for the beta, check your IndieDB-messages!

 Production

A lot of effort have gone into polishing things we’ve got feedback on, and fixing bugs hunted down by our testers. But we have also spent some time adding new content for the game, which should be available in the coming patch.

To begin with, there will be some slight improvements of the Arena. We have refined the point system of the challenges, which now works as follows: Your best grades in every challenge will add up to a total score, and when that total reach certain key numbers, you gain unique items.

For instance, let’s say S is worth 500 and A is worth 300. Then you would have 800 points in total, should you have achieved rank S in one and A in another. If you later increase your A to an S you will earn the remaining 200 points, giving you a total of 1000.

In such a system, we could let players who aren’t super hardcore get a taste of the unique items as well by having a reward at 500 points (which you could get with two As), and a second one on 1000 points (which only the best can get, with two S ranks).

This might be very technical, but hopefully it will make sense to you in the game. Speaking of which, to reflect the new point system we have also improved the arena interface as such:

As you can see, you can now view your current points, which reward you’ll get next, and how many points each rank will give you.

If you’re curious on which the next 3 rewards will be, we have added a poster showing just that on the wall of the Arena Lobby:

Speaking of those rewards, here are some of the new hats offered, in action:

The first three will be offered as rewards in the arena, as you just saw, while the fish hat will replace the old reward for unlocking the Pillar Mountains fishing achievement.

Another improvement we added was effects for some of the potions currently offered in the game. This one will be shown when you drink the Damage Potion, which boosts both your normal attack and skill damage:

We also made one for the Gale Potion, which increases your attack- and castspeed:

That’s all for now! Hope to see you soon in the beta ;)

Beta Info

So we’re currently waiting for Desura to approve our latest build, and when they do, the beta will officially start! We were originally planning on inviting only a few people this week, to test things out, but due to the inspiring amount of interest, we’re going to increase that cap.

To give you an idea of how much it has overshot our expectations, we were expecting around 30 people at best, and we currently have 490 usernames in our list. On the plus side, this means the game will become better, since we’ll have a larger feedback group, but even though we’ll invite larger groups it still means the chances of getting in quickly is reduced somewhat.

So, to give you an idea, we’ll invite 15-20 people within the next couple of days. This is mainly to make sure the technical and administrative aspects work as we want them to, such as: Can random users download and start the game? Does our “First Impressions”-thread generate the information we want? Is there a need for more forum categories?

If things work out the way we want them, we’ll invite about 30 more people next week, and then we’ll keep inviting new people whenever we need some new feedback and “first impressions”. We’re not 100 % sure about the intervals yet!

The invites will be sent via Desura/IndieDB, so check your messages there if you’ve registered! You’ll be invited to a closed group as well as the game, which contains a forum for you to discuss the game with us and other users.

Production

Production wise, the past week has been much about adding some polish and trying to make sure the new stuff was ready for the Desura upload, as well as fleshing out the amount of quests to do, items to craft, and so forth!

Here’s one of the enemy cards you can find (Rabby):

And here’s some of the new fishes you can find in the various lakes!

As for animations, Fred decided to give the old chicken coop some flare for when you herd chickens into it. Yes, you heard right. We have chicken herding in the game!

As the majority probably already knows by now, Steam’s new submission system Greenlight launched last Thursday, and we were lucky enough to jump into the mix quite early. If you have a Steam account but haven’t voted for us yet, you can find our Greenlight profile by clicking the image below!

We’re very happy with how the launch worked out for us. Partly thanks to getting in when there were only a few pages of submissions, we’ve got a ton of sweet exposure through Greenlight. At the time of writing, we’ve got 39 540 visitors, 4 909 favorites and 975 comments! That’s pretty insane.

We’ve also seen a really massive influx of Facebook likes, going from 460 to 600 in four days!

We realize this is largely because a lot of you guys have been spreading the word about the game, so a huge thanks goes out to you all for helping us out :)

Despite the number of Greenlight favorites, we’re still “only” at 4 %, but we think there’s no need to worry. Valve has stated that the number of votes isn’t the be all and end all of success, and Secrets of Grindea won’t even be released for a while so it’s not a catastrophe for us if we don’t get 100 % right away.

Regarding the beta, we’re still on said track: one week from now we’ll send out a handful of invites to test “administrative” stuff, like how the invites work, what forum categories we’ll need for the Beta forum, error reporting and so forth. A week after that, we’ll open the gates for the “real” beta testing! It’s been really cool to see the amount of interest and encouragement in the beta thread, and it’s still not too late to post in there if you haven’t. As mentioned in the thread, we’ll choose randomly from everyone who posts there before the beta starts!

So, a lot of time and energy have went into getting things ready for Greenlight and the beta, but we have managed to still get some work done on the game itself! Due to popular demand, we’ve added an experience bar to the HUD (previously it was shown only in the menu), as well as buff indicators.

When a buff is about to run out, it will start pulsating, and eventually become tinted red before disappearing. We might go for a WoW-like cooldown timer approach if testers find this system to be unclear, although the tiny resolution might make that a bit messy. The buffs in the screenshot above are a damage increasing potion, and a spell which increases attack- and cast speed!

We’ve also changed up the notices for when you complete a quest, get a new card and gain an achievement. They used to look very much alike, so we decided to add some flair to each of them:

Sort of how they all used to look

How they’re looking now

In game, they are filled with text and images, of course. Apart from the GUI-work, here’s a brand new two handed weapon you’ll be able to craft!

So yeah, that’s what’s been going on! Back to crunching!

We’re quite overwhelmed (and humbled) by the great reception of the video we posted last week. Most people seemed positively surprised at the combat system currently in place! There’s a couple of other subject we’d love to do spotlights on, so if we can find the time, expect some more videos in the future! :)

Now, let’s talk about the new things we’ve got to show this week. First off, we put the stylist to work! After months of just looking pretty in his booth, you can finally visit him to change your appearance.

You can both change hairstyle, or dye your hair or any of your clothes. Getting a haircut costs money, but changing colors is free!

Both getting a haircut and changing the color of something is a pretty straightforward affair, and you’re able to see the end results by looking at the preview to the right!

Apart from ending Franciscos welfare run, we also added something that’s been a long time coming: achievements! In the game, we call them ”trophies”, because we’re crazy like that.

The basic system probably doesn’t need an explanation, but here it is anyway: it’s a series of challenges geared towards obsessive people like ourselves. Usually though, most games give the player a nice sound, a pop-up and an entry somewhere and call it a day. We wanted to add something extra, and so every achievement comes with some form of reward.

Also, we have plans for some kind of housing system, where some achievements will give you actual trophies or decorations to put on display there! More on that when it actually exists…

Let’s stay true to tradition and finish the recap off with an animation! This time, it’s a new one handed weapon, The Stinger (quite literally)!

Tomorrow we’ll set up a way for you to register for the beta launch!

Stay tuned!

We’ve been going at this devblog thingy for nearly nine months without ever missing a recap, and while it’s a great tool to showcase the constant incremental improvements to the game, we’ve realized it isn’t quite as good at giving readers (especially newer ones) insight in how the game is actually played.

Sure, you can watch the SGA Trailer and see that it has a cute pixel art style, character customization, lots of loot, and maybe plays sort of like Zelda. For many people this is enough to get excited, but some might be curious as to how it all works more in-depth.

For the latter group (and anyone excited about the game, really), we’ve thrown together a pretty comprehensive walkthrough video explaining our combat system!

It might also be worth pointing out that some of the more insane parts of that video is more of a showcase of what you can do, not what you have to do. Our advanced mechanics are there for execution fanatics to indulge in, but we won’t force the average player to ascend to such a level. Unless you want to beat all that bonus content we discussed last week… in that case you better buckle up!

To wrap up the post, here’s a care package of animations from Fred!

The guy on the bottom is the city alchemist, Remedi, who needed a few extra animations for an escort quest where you must protect him from the blood thirsty inhabitants of the Pumpkin Woods!

Settling on a difficulty for a game is tough. We’re not making Super Meat Boy, where difficulty is a major selling point, but we don’t want to make the game a casual stroll in the park either.

What we’re going for now is tough for a casual player and challenging for an average player, but probably a tad bit too easy for hardcore gamers.

In order to add some extra mileage for those wanting to push their characters to the limit without putting huge road blocks in front of “normal” players, we added a feature to the arena called Challenges!

At the top level, you can select between Challenges and Versus.

Challenges are just that. Designed trials where your performance will be graded! In multiplayer, you’ll cooperate in these.

Versus is a collection of mini games where you can challenge your friends to a farm-off, the noble art of chicken herding and other wacky mini games! We might cover this in more detail some other time.

In the Challenge menu, you’ll see a list of all unlocked challenges, together with your current best grade (the grades go from ‘C’ to ‘S’). You’ll unlock more challenges as you progress through the story!

Most challenges will be tied to the combat mechanics of the game. For example, you might fight through waves of difficult enemy constellations, or battle a nightmare version of a boss!

When you’ve completed the challenge, you’ll get to see a scoreboard with your grades!

When you return to the arena reception, you’ll receive different items depending on what grade you got. Whenever you beat a challenge on S-rank for the first time, you’ll be rewarded with a unique item!

To move on to a completely different subject, we’re going to do the unthinkable and actually posting some info regarding the beta!

A while back we contacted Steam to see if we could run the beta on their platform. This was just before them announcing Greenlight, and as such, six weeks later we received a template reply telling us to check that service out.

Now, Greenlight seems great. However, it isn’t launching until the end of August (+Valve Time?), and there’s also no way of guessing right now how much Greenlight interest we must garner before being put on Steam, and how happy they are with indies prancing around running betas on there. While our skill at postponing betas is at Olympic level, even we didn’t want to delay it indefinitely!

So, we couldn’t do Steam, but we still wanted some centralized platform with automatic patching and ability to select users to invite. An indie friendly alternative to Steam that does just this is Desura.

Desura is pretty similar to Steam in many ways, and should be a pretty familiar experience for most players used to Valve’s platform. We’ve set up an IndieDB-page for the game in preparation. This is probably also where we’ll open up forums for our beta testers!

The beta isn’t running quite yet, but as you can tell things are moving along! We still have a few things to throw into the mix as far as the game goes. In the coming few weeks, we’ll give you more detailed information on how to register for the beta (we don’t know yet :D ), and shortly after that we’ll be throwing out the invites!

Wow, today’s post became really long… glad you made it to the end! See you next week! :)