GGC may be done and over with, but there’s still one big event to go! The SGA deadline is this Thursday, so there’s no rest in sight just yet. We’re currently spending most of our time hunting bugs in the multiplayer feature, but since that isn’t particularly exciting to look at we’ll show you some things we recently finished in time for GGC instead:

First of all, we decided to let one of our main characters, your irreplaceable friend the Bag, handle the gameplay hints:

Click it!

The hint box will appear when the Bag feels like there’s something you should know. For instance how a new item works, how to best defeat special enemies, when you’re heading in the wrong direction, and so on. You will be able to move freely while it’s there, so it won’t interrupt your battle or exploration like talking to a normal NPC would.

Another thing we added right before GGC was Signposts:

Click it!

As you can see, there’s no plain text going on here! We thought it would be more interesting and visually pleasing to use images instead. What do you think?

The signpost graphics will also appear automatically when you come close to a sign, and will disappear once you move away from it – so your hands are free here as well!

Speaking of visually pleasing, we also started working on a new portrait style with the feedback we received on the old ones in mind. Here’s a couple of the newcomers:

Hopefully you like these better, as we do. If not, let us know! We always appreciate the feedback, especially on such important matters as the portraits which will appear a lot in the game.

Last but not least, Evergrind is now almost fully populated! After you beat the Exam you may now explore the city and talk to its current inhabitants. At the moment we haven’t put in any shops, but they are well underway as well.

Click it!

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some bugs to hunt! ;3

Secrets of Grindea has survived its first appearance at an exhibition!

GGC ended yesterday, and the response was indeed amazing. Since it was the first time we let people other than our close friends try the game out for real, we did not know what to expect – but we were positively surprised.

We would like to thank everyone who played, your excitement is truly a huge inspiration :D

Thank You!
Tack så mycket!

Yes, it’s finally time to replace that old video on the front page with a real trailer, freshly made for the SGA and GGC!

As we’re in the middle of the last-minute crunchtime we’ll keep it short this time:

Now, time to get back to our attempts at making everything look and work as great as possible for the coming events! Wish us luck :)

This week we spent writing the major cutscenes that will be found in the beginning of the game. These things might change slightly as the game evolves, but should still tell the story properly.

Vilya also created the inside of the headquarters from last week:

Clickety click!

For now there are only three doors, but after the beta we plan on adding special rooms that will unlock as you progress on your adventure and gain rank within The Collectors Guild.

Fred spent the time making some more NPCs, ready to move into the soon bustling city.

We plan on making all our NPCs (save for the guards) special in some way, and in the end most of them should have at least one quest related to them. We’re doing our best to make sure it’s not just a bunch of the traditional “go kill 10 slimes” and try to come up with different types of activities for your character to participate in, but for the beta we might keep it simple to give people a chance to get familiar with the basic systems.

Other than that, we decided to spice up the spell casting graphics a little, adding this effect when releasing a charged spell:

The color will vary slightly depending on what type of spell it is.

We welcome you this week to the headquarter of The Collectors! This is the place where you’ll get a lot of your quests, and the most important ones at that. But of course, you have to earn your right to actually visit this place by completing a difficult trial first. Will you succeed? I guess we’ll see…

Click for larger version!

This week some people finally moved into the city of Evergrind as well! Here you can see them, minding their own business while waiting for their neighbors to settle :)

Last but not least, here’s a banner you’ll be able to see, should you visit Visby in 2½ weeks. Our school is arranging GGC, a small game conference on the island of Gotland and we’ll be there showing off our game live for the first time to the public! We’re very excited to see how people respond after playing it, and as you might guess we’ll be going into beta shortly after that weekend!

This week we have spent a lot of time on interface stuff, mainly the skill distribution interface and the shop screen! As they’re not fully implemented you’ll have to wait a bit longer to see how it works, but we promise a video of it in it’s full glory(?) once we’re done!

To move on to more interesting things, Vilya has spent some time of the week doing this abandoned temple that will be a main dungeon in the game!

Click it!

Unfortunately we won’t show any more than the entrance for a while, as we still need to backtrack to get the beta ready & polished, but to make up for it we have a few animations from Fred:

This is a powered up version of the move you saw last week: Blade Flurry. By holding the button for longer, you get that high damaging final strike.

And here’s the equivalent for the two handed overhead attack. If you just press the skill button, you’ll just get one hit off, but if you hold it, you’ll get an additional slash during the startup. This will both yield more damage, and make it easier to land.