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!