This week we’ve got some news!

First of all, we’ll very soon (first thing when we wake up tomorrow, actually) update the game with the new floors for Arcade Mode, for you guys to test! With this update we’re also adding a slight change to how Arcade Mode works, where you’ll receive a health potion instead of a health orb should you reach a new floor with full health! The health orbs will also remain after leaving the first room, so you can go back and collect it later :)

Secondly, a lot of you have been asking when the game will be available on Steam Early Access, and the answer to that is (hopefully) soon-ish! We have decided that it’s time we start getting that ball rolling, so we’re gonna focus on polishing the current content for an update of the Stable beta and create some fancy art for the various banners that appear on Steam. As soon as we’re done with that, the game should finally(!) be ready for early access over on Steam as well!

Now, for the actual ‘recap’ part of this blog, here’s some skill animations that Fred has been working on:

Vilya has kept working on the Time Travel Town in Mount Bloom, and this time around there’s a bunch of portraits of people you’ll meet there:

Videos of her working on these, as well as other parts of the area, can be viewed over on her personal Secrets of Grindea-themed YouTube account!

Now, back to work! See you next week :)

The past couple of weeks, Teddy have been working on bringing the new areas into Arcade Mode, and is finally closing in on finishing up (our hopes are to patch in the four new floors before the end of the week)!

We’re doing our best to find that sweet spot of being infuriatingly difficult, yet fair, and also creating interesting traps and compositions for the different areas. Beta testing these new floors is a bit of a challenge, seeing as only a handful of our glorious beta testers have reached the end of the current content, but eventually we’ll nail it down!

Meanwhile, Fred has been hard at work in the skill factory, creating new charges for all the spells! Below are new animations for the Summon Plant and Blade Flurry spells.

Vilya’s off doing her own thing, creating the environments for the next “temple”, a village with a twist on time! For those interested in her work (who isn’t?!), you should check out her blog, where she’s begun posting some sweet time lapses of her workflow!

Here’s her latest one for example, where she’s pimping out one of the early village maps:

A feature that has been missing since we first introduced charge levels to the skills have been the Gold Charge. Since most players wouldn’t reach high enough levels to unlock those we’ve been prioritizing pretty much everything else over them up until now.

However, we are reaching a point in the game where the Gold Charges are becoming relevant during the average playthrough. Introducing a new charge level will bring with it a lot of balancing and tweaking, so we decided the timing felt just right to start the rather massive task of finally implementing them properly into the game.

Because of the fast paced nature of the combat in Secrets of Grindea, we can’t go full “Knights of the Round” in terms of extravagant effects (even though we want to, deep down). We want to amp up the graphics of course, but still keep the fluidity of casting the skills. It will be an interesting balancing act going forward, but we’re confident we’ll be able to combine the best of both worlds!

Below are some “soon to appear in the game, coupled with some dope particle effects and other stuff to make them feel even cooler”-animations made by Fred during the past week. Namely for the Ice Spike, Heroic Slam and Insect Swarm.

BTW, if you’ve always had this cool idea of what your favorite spell’s Gold Charge would look like, or how it’d work, feel free to leave any suggestions in this thread on the forums, and we’ll check it out! :)

Meanwhile, Vilya has started sketching what will eventually become the next temple – which isn’t much of a temple at all, but rather a hidden village! Here are some of her early sketches, featuring a set of houses:

The village will be hidden inside a mountain and will be somewhat inspired by ancient Asia visually. More artwork from this village will be available next week! :)

For quite a while we’ve been going full steam ahead on the main story, focusing all of our effort on the Temple of Seasons. With the temple being more or less completed, we are taking a short vacation from Story Mode to focus on its beloved sibling: Arcade Mode!

Vilya has been busy puzzling together an array of graphical assets for Teddy to use for the upcoming Temple of Season-floors. The Season Change orbs will make the perfect Arcade Mode hazards, setting the stage for some beautiful chaos! 

While Vilya have had her hands full with the temple-floors, Teddy have been making sure that the Winterland-floors are up to par with the previous ones. Below are a somewhat graphical WIP of a Toy Factor puzzle turned Arcade Mode challenge!

While it’s not exclusively Arcade Mode, Fred (who’s finally back after his trip to Berlin, wooho!) have been in the animation workshop, crafting a bunch of new weapons for you Collectors to farm your hearts out with!

 

I know a lot of you will be disappointed that the spear isn’t being handled like an actual spear. Since introducing a whole new weapons class would be too much work at this point in time, swinging spears like an uneducated fool will have to do for now.

We’ve tried to compensate this by creating the first Twohanded Staff (2H-weapons that boost MATK), something that have been requested for a while!

This week has been fraught with biological interference! Teddy had begun bringing the Seasonne floors into the Arcade Mode properly, including making elite versions of all enemies, “traps” and some floor specific challenges. Sadly, his work got rather ham stringed by a seasonal thing known as the “winter vomiting bug”. We’ll leave the details of that to your imagination!

Incidentally, Vilya got hit with some severe toothache towards the end of the week, but still managed to put out some good stuff before getting incapacitated by lack of sleep. She’s been getting a bit too much sand in her eyes over the past weeks, so she decided to take a break from desert building by becoming a mad hatter!

Those of you who’ve played through the latest content has probably noticed a certain aspect of it that’s fairly lackluster, namely the sound effects!

While it’s pretty cool that everything in the entire dungeon either sounds like a slime getting hit or have no sound at all, that’s not how it’s supposed to be. To rectify this, Fred has been working on making video guides for our dear sound designers, which means we should have the assets we need to make the aural experience complete Soon™!

Lastly, we’d like to do a little shout out for the people over at Radical Fish Games, not only for their radical studio name, but also because they’ve set up a crowd funding campaign for their super cool ARPG project Cross Code! Check out their IndieGoGo-page, where you can find a free demo (playable in the web browser with help of black magic), and see if it’s something for you!