The work on the Gold Charges continues! There are now prototypes available for all skills, but a lot of them still need to have their animations polished so we’ll save showing those off for later. The Whirlslash gold charge has been more or less finished up though, and here you can see a gif of what that looks like in action:

You guessed it! Once you unlock the Gold charge, you can now move while using it! Pretty epic, no? The damage might be sliiightly unbalanced in this GIF tho.. ;)

Vilya has returned to working on the next Temple area, which in reality is more of a village. That means the future will hold lots of houses! Here’s the interior of two, with progress videos to go with them:

Now, no village is complete without people that live there, right? Here’s a couple of portraits of people that you will be able to meet, one an adventurer exploring the depths of Mt:Bloom, the other an inhabitant of the village itself:

Also, as Teddy’s properly adding the skills into the game engine, it’s not very uncommon for the animations to go through some iterations. The gold charge for the Ice Spike ended up needing some extra pazazz, as the old animation looked a bit to funky on it’s own. Below is a (hopefully) more intimidating ice spike, couple with some stray left over animations for the Frosty Friend!

As mentioned last week, we’re working full speed on getting the final charges up and running! While we’re not ready to patch them into the game yet, here’s a preview of three of them in action:

The Summon Plant gold charge introduces a new type of plant to the bunch. Instead of attacking, it’ll give bonuses to the plants you’ve already summoned (and will be summoned with a number of minion-plants of its own).  

You can only have one of these plants active at the same time, so if you summon it again it’ll move to your new location. However, it’ll bring any plants surrounding it along with it, so it’s perfect for moving plant traps to new strategic places!

Piercing Dash, meanwhile, has become both faster and longer, allowing you to dash through enemies and deal damage to them after passing through! For the more advanced players it might also be good to know that this level of Dash is now cancel-able, and canceling mid-dash will allow your next skill to become instantly gold charged.

Time for some epic combos? :)

Finally, the Blade Flurry gold charge increases the number of hits and has a 3-hit finisher that deals additional damage!

Now, while the boys have been busy with the skills, Vilya has kept working on improvements for the menu. Here’s the improved Equipment tab:

As you can see, we’re finally introducing style slots for weapons and shields! This is something that has been requested a lot, and since we’re reworking this menu anyway we thought we might as well squeeze it in. As we’d like the Steam Early Access release to happen sooner rather than later, though, we’re not 100% sure the style slots will be implemented before the EA release, but it’s definitely coming soon after, at the very least.

We’re also reworking the Character tab:

Gone is the boring super brown text-only tab, and instead we have a more colorful and actually ID-looking tab for your collector. The Birthday and Starsign will be randomly generated, as will your Collector ID number. Also, the stats you see here are temporary: we’re replacing a few and removing others. Since this isn’t actually implemented yet, there may be small changes here and there, but the overall look should remain.

Next week, Vilya will finally return to doing stuff for the next temple, while Teddy & Fred soldier on with more gold charges!

Hi guys! Another week has gone past, and it’s finally getting warm in Sweden (yay)!
In the office, we’ve been spendin’ time on a bunch of different things. Teddy & Fred are working on the Gold Charge Skills, so we have a bunch of prototypes up and running! They’re still in need of some edits and huge amounts of polish, but we’re getting there.

Vilya kept working on menu edits, and the left side of the menu will officially look like this once it’s been implemented:

A bit less brown, and a bit more graphic heavy, with swirls and decorations added since last week :)

Speaking of graphic heavy, she’s also been repainting the haircuts & polished the various palettes available for them. We had a bunch of issues with the old ones, where skintone pixels were visible through the hair in some styles, and the overall rendering technique wasn’t the best. Also, we found the palettes to be pretty lackluster…

So, that has hopefully been fixed, and should be up and running within the next few patches!

Hairstyle Reworks, Part 2:

New Palettes:

(For the palette previews we’ve used different haircuts, so some of the colors might look a bit different than they do when you apply them to the same style!)

Next week (technically, this week) we’ll continue working on the Gold Charges, so hopefully we’ll be able to show you some of that next recap! See you then! :)

Two weeks ago, we showed a bunch of new menu icons. This week, Vilya continues to rework the menu graphics! First up, we have new menu titles, adding a touch of color to the otherwise very brown menu:

Second, we reworked the skill boxes a bit:

With this new look, we hope to tie the appearance of the Skill-tabs together with the Talent counterpart. Also, more graphics & colors, yay!

We’ve also begun reworking the character box, again removing some brown (in the current version, it’s floating in a brown box) and having it stand on its own:

We’ll continue working on this left side of the menu later, literally tying things together a bit more visually, so it’s not just three boxes floating next to eachother!

Now, for something that’s actually already in the game… As of the latest update, we now have actual Steam Achiements! And with some of these achievements, we’ve added new rewards for your character.

Below you can see a selection of these rewards (go get ’em now!):

Lastly, we’re currently thinking of ways to implement the new promo art in our website background. Here’s a mockup of what it could like, though we’re not quite there yet:

So, this week we had the honor of being judges at GGC, or Gotland Game Conference, a local games conference hosted by our school, where the students at the Game Design program showcase their game projects and compete for a set of prizes! It’s great to get a chance to meet fellow game developers, talk about the business and just take a short break.

The games were amazing, as always. We keep saying that each year only gets better, and this time was no exception! Below is a showcase video featuring the games that were competing this year, and most of them were really fun:

The Grand Prize winner was Frog Climber, which was a first year project, so it’ll be interesting to see what the developers come up with next year!

Since no weekly recap would be complete without any sort of Secrets of Grindea update, this time we’re sharing two of Vilya’s portrait WIP videos from her personal YouTube account:

The videos feature future Santa Fae residents and the finished sprites can be viewed below: