This week, we’ll simply distract you with some art while we finish off a couple of more quests for you to enjoy in that legendary beta…! ;3

Fred’s main focus this week has been revisiting our beloved Evergrind City and creating more flavor animations for the people living there.

And Vilya has finally finished remaking the portraits!

We’re celebrating that by starting some new interface work that you’ll hopefully be able to see next time :)

This week we’ve implemented a couple of quests, and as a part of that, we also created a quest tracker! It’s nothing too fancy, and does pretty much what you’d expect.

When you’re looking at the list of active quests, you can press Tab to focus the tracker on that quest. Yes, this particular quest is an old fashioned “fetch quest”. We’re showing it here because it demonstrates the quest tracker well. Don’t worry, we’ll have other types of quests, too! :)

When tracked, a shortened version of the objectives will be stickied to the top right corner of the screen, which helps a lot in these types of quests. We’ll probably enable tracking for crafting recipes as well, so you can keep a list of ingredients on screen while farming!

Apart from creating the GUI for quest tracking, Vilya keeps up with the tradition of handing out portraits to the poor!

Here’s a sprite of the guy on the bottom left made by Fred:

Here’s the death animation for another enemy from our beloved Pumpkin Forest, this time it’s the Scarecrow’s turn to bite the dust.

Besides keeping up with the death animations from last week, Fred took the time to work on the sprite for a new enemy in the game. Aside from being cute and round, this fierce piggy will have the ability to charge the player with incredible force, not even stopping when smashing into the otherwise very useful shield!

Above is a patchwork of the different iterations he went through before we settled on a little more juicy version. The last three are different color variations of the same sprite. Since we already have another brown cuddly creature hanging around in the same area (the Rabby) we figured it would be good to separate them a bit from each other! We might still go with brown and just not have Rabbys and boars in the same zone, though.

Meanwhile, Vilya has been going strong in her portrait factory:

One of the few problems with a magic bag full of loot is figuring out what to do with all your junk. Luckily, there is a great remedy for this issue: turning your junk into new kinds of junk, also known as crafting!

In Grindea, you can visit certain NPCs which will help you craft items close to their expertise. Mr Fabulous, the Evergrind hatter, will let you craft hats for example.

The screenshot above is the crafting view at his shop. You don’t need to unlock recipes in order to craft stuff. Instead, any recipe with at least one item that you already own will appear in the list. The little bar below the item icon is an indicator on how close you are to being able to craft this item! If you don’t have enough ingredients to craft an item, it will show up only as a silhouette. When you’ve gathered all the items required, the bar will turn green and the real icon will appear.

When you press on an item, you will be able to view more detailed information of what the ingredients are, how many you need, and how many you own of each ingredient. Of course, you can view this information even if you haven’t collected all the ingredients yet! If you have all the required parts, you can craft the item. In this case, a sweet slime hat!

Another crafting feature we implemented at the same time was the ability to browse recipes based on ingredient directly from your inventory!

When you press on an item that’s a part of any recipe, you’ll get an option called “Recipes”. Selecting this option will take you to a nifty little recipe browser, listing all items in the game that can be created using that particular item.

Note that even if you don’t have all the ingredients for an item, you can still see what type it is, as well as what stats it will have when you craft it. We don’t want players to farm blindly for an hour to make a new sword, only to find out that the weapon they had used to bash all those slimes had been better all along!

(…of course, a true collector will want to craft everything just for the bragging rights) :3

Crafting, like much else, is not mandatory in order to complete the main story. Neither will it be a breaking powergaming feature like in some modern RPGs, where crafting makes even the rarest of unique drops obsolete. We’ll try to create a balance where both crafted equipment and rare gear are equally powerful. Now, if you craft something from the rarest of components, however…

New week, new update. So what have we’ve been up to?

Vilya’s been busy remaking portraits and building items for the item shops. Here’s a bunch of familiar faces:

Besides those good looking chaps, Vilya has also managed to squeeze in some sprites for a few of the potions we have available in the game!

Speaking of potions, we could probably do some explaining on what role they will play in the game.

Beginning with everyone’s all time favorite, the health potion! Health potions are one of two ways players can use to regain lost HP. Besides the good old potions we also have healing orbs that enemies will drop every now and then that players can pickup to regain some health.

Now, we are not going for the potion spam found in Diablo 2 and such. We wanted players to use the health potions tactically and sparingly and such they have a cap for how many you can carry around with you. What we wanted to achieve with this setup was to have players refilling health when fighting regular enemies mostly through the orbs and saving the potions for more challenging encounters, like boss fights and such.

Worth mentioning is that we used to have three ways players could use to regain health. We had a healing spell that unfortunately got cut due to the changes we did to our mana system. It basically allowed for players to regain full health after every encounter with little to none risk. We felt this turned the game too easy, as well as forcing players to always spend skillpoints on heal since it was by far the most efficient way to regain health.

Besides your trustworthy healing liquid we have a bunch of potions that will temporarily boosts your characters stats. You will only be able to have one of those potions activated at the same time so you have to play your cards right and use the right potion for the right situation!

In the animation department, we have gone back to our lovely inhabitants of the Pumpkin Forest and supplying them with some proper death animations! Here’s how the Lantern Jack looks like when defeated:

Next week, we’ll turn up with more of the same and be even closer to an official release of the beta!

What would a parody on the RPG genre be without some good ol’ fishing?
Not much, if you ask us!

As such, the past week we’ve been adding a little fishing mini game (among other things)!

Checking for a good spot!

You’ll be able to fish from most bodies of water in the game. When you stand on a spot where you can fish, a little emote will pop up above your head, and pressing the action button will make your character enter the mini game. For as long as you’re fishing, monsters won’t try to harm you, so you don’t have to worry about some ninja respawn ruining your day!

Soon…

Click image to view animated gif!

After you’ve thrown your fishing float out, you’ll just have to patiently wait for a bit for a fish to bite. Fish in Grindea is always hungry though, so you’ll probably not have to wait for long!

When a fish does bite, you’ll enter a little mini game that’s inspired by the one in Suikoden II, and sort of reminiscent of the arm wrestling game in The Witcher 2. You’ll control a little bar, that’s attached to a larger bar, and your goal is to keep a randomly moving fish inside it. If the icon leaves your bar, the fish will escape! If you want to see it in action, click on the image above for an animated version!

Yes! A fishie!

You win the battle when the fish reaches the shore. For your hard work, you’re awarded the fish itself! Of course, fishing is also a reliable way to acquiring some solid boots…

The fishing game is part of an effort to give players a reason to stay a while and enjoy the scenery, while also adding even more mileage for the hardcore fans and the completionists. Players won’t have to stay and fish, but for those looking to just chill out a bit after a long day of adventuring, it’s good to know there are other things to do!

We heard you liked this journal, so we put our journal in our journal so you can…

Seriously, though, this blog post will be about the Journal Screen of the game menu! It’s designed to be your one stop shop for the administrative part of being a collector. In the Journal, you’ll find quest logs, information about enemies and NPCs, tutorials and gameplay hints and also the most coveted collection of them all: your Card Album!

Click images to view full scale!

We touched this subject a while back, but enemy cards are super rare, unique collectibles dropped by nearly every enemy in the game. Of course, only the enemy depicted can drop that specific card!

If a card is found, it is put into your Card Album, which is separate from your inventory. Cards cannot be sold or traded, so they are the true testament to your farming prowess! Each card in the game also have a different passive effect.

An effect can either be a small boost to a stat, or have a more advanced effect, such as the Green Slime Card in the screens above. They are usually not extraordinary on their own, but if you manage to get a sizable collection, the combined effect will be quite powerful!

On the topic of enemies, another cool feature of the Journal is the Enemy Codex:

In the Enemy Codex, you can find out more about enemies you’ve encountered! You can find lore and basic stats regarding each enemy, and sometimes useful hints on how to defeat them.

The arguably most useful thing about the Enemy Codex for the completionist, however, is the list of all drops that is available next to each discovered enemy’s name! Items you’ve owned at some point are lit up, while undiscovered items are darkened. This lets you know if an enemy type has dropped all it can, or if there might be reason to stay a while and get your grind on!

Lastly, let’s cover a more classic part of journals, the Quest Log:

This quest is so unique we’re considering trademarking it

There isn’t that much to say about the Quest Log! It basically tracks the progress of your active quests, and serve as an archive for your completed ones! If you’re ever stuck on some quest, consulting your Quest Log will probably help you out.

Wow, that was quite an exhausting post. Hope you found it interesting! Next week, we’ll hopefully have finished our fishing minigame!

At the end of last week we’ve finally established a little bit of order again. We spent that time implementing shops, so players can finally spend all those coins (or crafting ingredients) they keep finding!

This particular shop is Mr. Fab’s Fabulous Hats, where you can satisfy your vanity with some fancy headgear! Of course, the selection of all the shops will expand as the game progresses. If you’re having terrible luck with getting sweet drops, going to Evergrind and throwing some cash at the problem is a good backup plan!

Also, heads up for followers who might be in Stockholm this coming Wednesday! We’ll be showing the game off at the Central Station from around 8 – 16 (8AM – 4PM), together with lots of other sweet games that made it to the Swedish Game Awards finals!

As our studies at the University of Gotland have come to an end, we’ve all moved out of our apartments to go back home for the summer. As it turns out, moving out of a place takes a lot of work that can’t be solved from behind the computer! Who knew?

Because of all the cleaning, packing, transporting and then unpacking, there’s not much we can show you this week! Don’t worry, though. We’ll resume the beta crunch as soon as we’ve got our stuff in order!

In other news, we’ve been nominated for “Game of the Year” in SGA! Woo! The competition is pretty fierce though, so we’ll see how it goes. But here’s to hoping! :)

This week has been quite busy! It’s only been a few days since the SGA deadline now, for which we finished up and tested the co-op feature like there was no tomorrow. While that was our big focus of the week, we also managed to improve some of the old portraits:

These portraits have actually made quite the journey to get to this point. Here’s a pic showing how they improved since the first version:

Kind of make you wonder how different they will be once the game is done. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last iteration just yet!

Other than that, we also added a couple of animations for the people in Evergrind City, to make the area feel a little more alive:

Now, wish us luck with SGA! Nominees should be announced in the next couple of days :)