New week, new area! We decided to venture underground for this one, but we still wanted to keep the lushes nature of an outdoors area. So we simply decided the combine the two, to create Mount Bloom.

Filled with enormous mushrooms and strange vegetation, the cave system of Mount Bloom is one of the oldest and largest in all of Grindea. Home to both hostile creatures  and friendly crystal miners in need of help, Mount Bloom is a true test for even the more experienced collectors. Poisonous spores act as a natural defense for anyone who ventures to deep and some even say the caves used to be nesting grounds for dragons.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally got a proper work station set up! While working on the kitchen table definitely had its perks, it’s nice to have the “office” up and running.

Since Vilya lives all the way down in the Netherworld, we have set up Teddy’s good old Netbook to act as a permanent satellite uplink!

Let’s start off with the game related stuff we can show off! Vilya has, among other things, created the temple entrance for the temple of seasons:

The symbols on the circles signify the different seasons, and we’ve got some mechanics in store for the temple that we hope will be fun to use :)

In other news, Teddy and Fred has gotten their new apartment in order for maximum Grindea grinding! A step in that direction has been to create two coffee tables themed after the game.

Above is a shot taken right after we finished them up

And here they are in their natural habitat (sorry for bad camera :[ )

We haven’t been slacking off, though! As promised, we’ve started working on the temple boss, but we don’t want to show it off just yet. How much do you guys want to see anyway? Are you afraid of spoilers? Do you want us to show everything?

Sometimes we feel that we’re showing off a bit too much, but maybe that’s what you guys following the dev blog want anyways!

It’s time again for our weekly recap – this time we have a bunch of random things, as well as some good news:

For a long while now we’ve had some pretty tough time communicating due to us living in 3 very different parts of Sweden. However, as of last week Fred and Teddy has finally moved back to Gotland and are now roomies – something which we really hope will improve the speed and quality of the production.

Their first mission will be to finish the main boss of the dungeon! We’ve been saving it since it needs a lot of fine tuning and screen pointing, which is cumbersome to do online.

As for the work we’ve done this week, here’s a bunch of random stuff:

Here’s the interior of the treestump previously seen in a screenshot of the Fae village. This is where the Elder Fae gather to keep order in the forest and among their kin.

And while we’re on the topic of Elder Fae, we’ve shown you 3 before, representing Winter, Spring and Summer. Here’s the last one, representing autumn:

In the animation department we have an effect which you’ll see in an upcoming mini-boss fight with the mysterious Phaseman:

There’s also this a scary-but-kind-of-cute enemy roaming the snow lands we’ve been working on lately:

Lastly, we present to you the Ice Spike skill, a spell which we actually completed a very long time ago, but which we haven’t included in the beta as of yet. This skill will make ice spikes appear in the direction you’re casting it.

Click on the image to see the animated gif if it doesn’t play automatically:

This week, we’ve been squeezing in some new magic spells into the game! If you’re a returning reader, you’ve probably seen some graphics of a couple of them.

Click the pictures to view them as animated images!

Here’s a Chain Lightning spell, working pretty much in the classic way! It will hit the closest enemy in front of you (and in range), and will then jump to new enemies until the max amount of jumps has been reached, or there are no more enemies to jump to.

Next is a Meteor spell, which has the same targeting system as the Earth Spike. However, unlike the Earth Spike, there’s a slight delay before it hits, so you need to plan ahead. On the plus side, it hits like a truck (that’s crashing down from the sky)!

Lastly, here’s the Plant Summon in action! Unlike the Cloud, you can summon a bunch of these babies, but they are stationary and can’t follow you around. Use them like traps and bait enemies into them!

Meanwhile in Fairyland, more portraits have been raining in! Here’s the Summer Elder, worried that winter will never end:

And here’s a regular Summer Fae, sharing her elder’s discomfort with the sudden cold snap:

As this week’s parting gift, please accept this little animation of a Brawler Bot waking up from a long, long slumber!

Vilya has kept busy with some more portraits this week. These two sparkling looking fellows below are two of the Fae elders, there are four of them in total. They all represent one season each, can you guess which?

Since we’re starting to have quite a few characters in the game now, we’ve been considering ways to make it visually clear who are more important than others. As a result we’ll most likely go over the portraits once more and make the main characters stand out a bit more in terms of detail and design, and, on the other end, make sure that the lesser characters aren’t too fancy.

While this revamp will probably have to wait until the last stages of development we’re definitely keeping this in mind for our future character designs, and have already done so in regards of the Fae: while the two Fae’s pictured above are important to the storyline and the Fae society in general, there two are not:


How do you feel about us differentiating main character vs filler/sidequest characters this way?

We’ve seen many different methods used in games, all ranging from side characters not having portraits at all, to letting them be extremely drab or even have the same 4-5 portraits reused for all characters that aren’t important to the plot. At the moment we think what we mentioned above is the best way for our game, but we’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!

Fred on the other hand has been busy with some outside projects. Below is the final assignment for an animation course he has been taking the last few months! It’s a bit choppy at times due to some exporting issues from Flash, but we hope you’ll enjoy it in spite of that :)

Be prepared for some glorious Grindea animations when the game is closing in on release!