Things have calmed down after the Steam Early Access launch, and things have gone back to normal here in the Pixel Ferrets office!

Vilya has spent a lot of time doing portraits recently, both for the new area(s) and for new fae that will appear in Santa Fae:

Some of the old fae (and the new) also needed new expressions, seeing as the life of a fae is filled with both joy and horror currently:

She has also, of course, been doing new backgrounds for the next temple, which means more interiors left in ruin:

Fred, meanwhile, has been creating stuff for a flashback cutscene that will take place once you get back to the HQ in the next part of the story! This whole thing will involve two things primarily: your mother Charlotte, and…. a dragon?!

Now, as for Teddy, he’s been mostly busy implementing a bunch of UI improvements (Sword and Shield style-slots, wohoo!) as well as tweaks and fixing bugs revealed to us by our awesome beta testers! Once these updates roll out and are confirmed stable we’ll start updating Frontline only for a while again, starting with the cutscene/flashback thingy mentioned above.

See you next week! :D

First of all, thank you all for your support and awesome e-mails, helpful forum comments, and everything else related to our Steam Early Access launch last week! You guys have been amazing.

In terms of how the EA launch went, it was well over our expectations. We honestly didn’t think much was gonna happen, seeing as we did literally 0 PR for the launch, but apparently word of mouth (and Steam’s discovery features) are more powerful than we thought. Because of this there were a couple of hectic days where most of our time went into answering e-mails and solving new bugs, but thankfully (?!) most of that seems to have calmed down for now. :)

So, yesterday we patched the game (both Stable and Frontline) and added a bunch of bug fixes!

If you had issues with co-op before, chances are your problems have been solved now – or so we hope! We also added a bunch of new hairstyles that can be tried out at Francisco’s stand in Evergrind City or when you create a new character. We’ll update both builds at least once more before focusing on Frontline again for a while – if you’re a new player and are unsure of what I’m talking about, check out this thread on the forums to see the difference between Stable and Frontline beta, and how to change between them.

Some of you have noticed that the DRM-free version available through the Humble widgets and on the Humble Store is outdated (same goes for the Demo download through our site). We’ll update both of those once we’ve patched the Stable one last time in the coming week(s)! In the meanwhile, if you’re looking to play the Demo, know that a more recent version can be downloaded through Steam (there’s a button which says ‘Download Demo’ right next to the ‘Early Access Game’-box).

Now, we’ll continue to work on the next part of the Story Mode! Vilya is of course already working on backgrounds for the next temple, some which can be seen here:

I think we’ll leave it at that for this week, tune in next Monday for more updates on our progress! And again, thank you all for your support :)

Instead of a regular Weekly Recap, here’s an announcement for you:

Secrets of Grindea is officially live on

Steam Early Access!

For those of you who are looking to buy the game now that it’s properly on Steam, it might be a good idea to look into which beta version you’re the most interested in. Here’s a forum guide showing how to swap between the two (Stable and Frontline) and why you may or may not want to do it.

We’d also like to remind those who already bought the game that it’s now possible to review the game (or at least, what’s available so far) on Steam, so if you want to do that, that’d be awesome!

Whether you’re a new or old player, we welcome you into our community and hope that you enjoy the game so far! As always, feel free to drop by our forums to ask questions, leave bug reports/feedback or simply stay a while and chat :)

The Steam Early Access launch draws closer! Either today or tomorrow we’ll patch the gold charges into the game, and once they’ve been tested and polished (certain visual elements are still missing) I think we’re good to go :D

SO, once the game is patched we ask all Frontline users to help us bug test these babies! Perhaps it’s time to try out a completely new build? :)

In the meanwhile, here’s a few GIFs featuring gold charges that will be available in the patch once it goes live:

First up is Frosty Friend! He’s certainly gotten bigger, and as of the next patch, you can give him commands!

He starts out with a defensive stance which increases his DEF and regenerates HP slowly if he’s out of combat, the silver charge unlocks a DPS boosting skill that lasts a few seconds, and the gold charge has an AoE slam attack (pictured above)! :)

Here’s the Heroic Slam! The animation has gotten a bit more elaborate, as you can see, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same old skill, but with increased damage output!

Finally, the Cloud Strike, aka the summoned cloud! He’s as happy as ever, striking left and right with his fearsome thunder. Other than being bigger and meaner, he also has a chain lightning effect on certain attacks :)

We haven’t stopped working on the next temple either! Here are some new backgrounds and character portraits that Vilya has been working on:

Once the patch goes live we’ll make a post on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, details will be found over at the Patch Notes part of our forums :)