This week, things have been moving forward at a steady pace. Vilya has continued working away with putting together the dungeon interior as well as wiping together some more card art. Below is the cards for the Brawler bot and the Wisp, both enemies of our first dungeon.

Fred is back in the groove after fighting off school work for the last couple of weeks, working away at some heavy boss creating for the dungeon! We’ll probably keep all of the boss details on the down under to give you guys something to look forward and fantasize about, but we promise it will be big, mean and contain a lot of heavy weaponry.

So for the coming few weeks, the updates might be a bit less meaty since both Fred and Teddy will be hammering away at the super secret boss in joined forces. We will try to make it up to you by dishing out a new video (content unknown for now) in the near future, so stay alert!

Every monster needs its card, and minibosses or bosses are no exception! Here are the cards for Phaseman and Giga Slime:

As you can see, they have slightly more extravagant frames than regular cards, and we plan to make their effects a bit more awesome than most normal cards (although not ridiculously overpowered like the RO boss cards). Now you’re all probably thinking “but wait, what if I defeat the boss and don’t get a card? :(”

In order to let the completionists be completionists, we’re adding a Memory Room to the Collector’s HQ!

As you start out, the Memory Room is just a long corridor of empty pedestals, but for every miniboss or boss you defeat, a miniature trophy of it will appear on one of these pedestals. If you ever want to fight that battle again, either for the heck of it or because you want to get the card, you can activate the trophy and relive the battle!

Hopefully, by the time the game is done, there will be a ton of those pedestals to fill!

This week we’re jumping back into the flying dungeon!

We have planned ahead for what to do next, and Vilya started off making a bunch of drops that you’ll find as you slay your way through the area.

All of the items are either equipable, edible or build into something that is. Exactly what they are and what they’re used for is something you’ll have to find out for yourself, though! Can you guess already?

There’s also a hat:

Next week will be spent making cards and the very last few rooms of the dungeon. Hopefully by then Fred has done away with his remaining schoolwork so we’ll see some more animations too! Perhaps we’ll even start on the dungeon boss…

After gaining weight and laziness over the duration of our little break, it’s finally time to start getting back to work.

Vilya’s still trying to keep the spirit of christmas alive by making sprites for our winter area:

There’s christmas trees, snowmen, and lots and lots of snow, as you can see! Of course, no area is complete without hats, so it’s time we started making a few of those as well:

Another piece of development news, which will be very exciting to some, and not-so-exciting to others, is that we’re working on some translation tools! We’ve gotten quite a few offers to have fansub groups translate our game to various languages, and if there are fans out there who want to bring the game to their non-English speaking countrymen, why not let them?

Basically, it’s a set of tools that can be used by anyone to change dialogue (and other texts). You have access to everything you need, like coloring parts of the text, or adding conditional phrases (like having a character say different things depending on character gender, or how many is in your party). By saving it into the game’s language folder, you can then select it in game.

Our hopes are that the tools will be used to make better translations than we’d be able to get even if we hired someone to help us! In their final version, the goal is to have good support for collaboration, with options to merge different language files and keep the best translated lines.

Also, having an approach like this can let players choose between, say, a literal translation by one group and an idiomatic translation by another. Perhaps a fan with a great knack of dialogue writing will even release an improved English version!

What happened to the dungeon? Fear not, it hasn’t been forgotten! We’ll most likely get back to it in the coming week, after discussing how to proceed :)

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!