Hello guys! It’s me, Vilya (actually, I’m the one writing almost all Weekly Recaps, but you wouldn’t know that I guess)!

Today, Fred left town to go home and spend Christmas with his family, and Teddy got the flu and is out of business right now (hopefully he’ll get better in time for the actual holidays). SO I’m sitting here alone tonight, writing this rather late recap, which will also be the last one this year! We’re taking a break until New Years, so we’ll return with the Weekly Recaps on January 11 when we’ve had a week of work back at the office :)

Now, what have we been up to this last week of work? Well, pretty much a bit of everything, as always!

This is a background I’ve made which you’ll pass through after completing the Flower Challenge that we’ve been showing prototypes of lately. Basically you just go in, grab whatever’s in the chest, and leave, so it’s pretty straight forward:

A little bonus GIF of the steps:

Next up, a short map connecting two of the cave areas with each other. Again, just a short breather room:

There’s also this odd portrait of a rather strange mushroom-man! What the-?!

No further comments on that… yet :)

Fred, meanwhile, has been working on a set of miners that will appear throughout the cave, minding their own business or hindering yours:

I know a lot of you want to know more about what Teddy does on the programming side as well, so I’ll tell you this: lately he has been focusing on adding multiplayer support for the challenges we made so far, as well as actually starting to prototype the third one properly! Yay!

He has also been working on ways to make the lag less annoying to those of you who have friends living further away, and he actually even prepared a bunch of graphics to show you how he’s doing it. However, since he’s sick right now, I think we’ll have to save that for next year since he can probably explain that stuff a lot better than I can :)

Speaking of next year: I wish you all an awesome holiday, filled with happiness (and perhaps some fun gaming?!)! You guys are such an amazing community and we’re all so thankful for you support! We’ll keep working on making Secrets of Grindea even better, with much more content next year, and I hope you’ll join us for the ride!

See you in a couple of weeks! :D

We’re entering the final stages of finishing the first two challenges! We’ve also done some more prototyping for the third, but we’re still not 100% satisfied with that one yet, so it needs some more work.

Anyway! Since we’ve more or less finished the flower challenge, it’s time for it to get a proper background! So here it is, along with a step-by-step gif showing how Vilya created it:

Since it’s almost time to start battling stuff in Mt Bloom, there were a couple of more hats that needed to be made as well (what are quest rewards or item drops without one or two hats, right?). Here are three Mt Bloom themed hats, plus a duck beak for good measure:

Oh, and of course there needs to be a couple of NPCs to guide (or hinder) your progress through the cave system. Here’s one such NPC, a miner, whose portrait Vilya made last week:

Fred has been busy making sprites of said NPCs! Here’s a few sprites for the Cavelings Vilya put together last week:

This week we’ve worked on refining the challenges, especially the Flower Challenge we showed you some prototype GIFs of last week. It’s coming along nicely, with more and more proper graphics added (still needs a new background, though):

We still have a bit of tweaking to do, but we’re getting there!

Meanwhile, Vilya made a proper background for the Spinsect challenge, which will be further improved by Fred later on, who will add animated Spinsects looking out through the holes in the wall:

She also went over the map with the statue, adding a bit more details (more moss & crystals in the stone circles):

There’s also another character being made, who will appear a bit earlier than Mt Bloom! :o

Finally, here’s a couple of animation reels made by Fred, featuring some of the thing he has been working on this week: