One thing we didn’t mention in last weeks posts are what will happen to your old potions. We aren’t so cruel as to simply remove or disable the pots you’ve bought so far – instead they will turn into pet food (which, honestly, is probably what most of you have used them for so far).

As such, we’ll be adding a new shop to the game: Oak’s Pet supplies, found at the farm in Evergrind West! At Oak’s Pet Supplies you’ll be able to buy dishes to feed your pet(s) with, each one boosting a different stat.

At first, we weren’t sure whether we wanted to keep these foods simple, calling them simple things (such as HP Food, Crit Food, etc) and having a very basic appearance (basic pet food cans in different colors and with different icons depending on what stat they boost). However, after some discussion we thought it’d be more fun to use ‘real’ dishes, with fancier names.

Sure, it does not make as much sense that Oak is selling outright food at his farm, but we’ll make that work later on. Maybe that’s why nobody is buying things at Belmont’s café? Oak is serving better stuff for cheaper! It’s food for pets but who cares so long as it’s tasty, right..?

Anyway, without further ado, introducing the dishes that have replaced your old potions:

Light Ceasar Salad – Nothing like a light salad to keep you up on our feet! This dish is replacing the old speed potions, and boost speed when fed to your pet.

Hearty Stew – A thick and warming stew to boost your health! Feed it to your pet and you’ll get a nice HP increase.

Spicy Prawn Soup – A hot soup that will help you land those crits after you feed it to your pet.

Grilled Rib Eye Steak – A grilled beef to keep your damage high. Replaces the old damage pots.

Sweet Sundae – Finally, a sweet dessert for your EP needs. Feed your pet this yummy dish and it will be sure to help you keep that EP up and running.

Here’s the final lineup:

And the title of the shop page! We decided to go for Pet Supplies rather than Pet food since we want to keep our options open: maybe Oak will end up selling other things as well! Such as new taming items…. We’ll see!

Now, time to get back to the Arcadia rework, and we begin with a quick update with some random improvements/additions! First up, I felt the Farm outdoors looked awfully empty, so I added a bunch of hay for your pets to eat, just to make it look a bit more special:

Second, way back we decided that the furniture salesman should have a little sign like all the other shops, so I went back and added it outside the player house:

Speaking of the player house, we also mentioned ages ago that the player house in Arcadia would be the one available in Evergrind as well, rather than the random run-of-the-mill house currently available. Said and done:

Finally, something not-Arcadia related! We’re considering adding a painting of the player’s mother in the lab, where you dad hangs out with the artifacts. Just a little reminder of why you’re collecting them in the first place~

Now, finally time to move indoors and start doing some cool house interiors (it’s been a while now)! Today, we’re starting off with the Clock Tower, featuring the world’s longest GIF. I should have just recorded a video of this whole thing but I’ve been doing GIFs so much now that I just completely forgot I also have a YouTube channel for these things. Oh well!

This place was actually quite a bit of a struggle! I’m working on my rendering technique for those pesky wall textures, trying to fins a nice balance between too plain and too much detail/colors.

The main part of this room is the bell, which will allow you to change the time of day, and the window which indicates what time of day it is. The window will be animated by Fred at some point, where the image will turn from night to day. At that point the background might look completely different depending on what’s easier to animate for him, but for now I just put a piece of the Arcadia background there instead of keeping it empty.

Finished version, for now:

Next up we continue the Arcadia rework, today starring the the farm interior! This place will have the same look and feel as the farm in Evergrind West, only with updated graphics and more stuff.

We’re actually considering replacing the old farm interior in Story Mode with this one, but we haven’t fully decided yet. On one hand it looks a lot better graphics wise, on the other it’s kind of nice to have the unlock in Arcadia be a bit more special. On the third hand (…let’s not get into anatomy…) many players will probably never play Arcade Mode or get to the point where they unlock the Farm, so it means a lot of people won’t get to see the better version, while most people likely will visit the farm in Story Mode at some point.

Ah, we’ll see.

Anyway, here’s the creation video:

And while I continue doing Arcadia stuff, Fred returns to the desert! Over the weeks I’ve made quite a bunch of portraits for people in the desert, and now it’s time for Fred to start making their sprites~

Here’s a bunch of the inhabitants you’ll be able to talk to in the upcoming desert town, also featuring their WIPs and various stages before the final versions were picked (the final selection are the one in the circle on top):

There’s also a bunch of fishes being made for the Aquarium that will be available in the Arcadia Rework! So exciting, look how cute they are:

Gotta catch ’em all… :D

And so, the potion patch is up! This patch includes the complete potion rework, a ton of new pots, a rework of Remedi and his first quest plus a brand new quest involving Remedi and his nephew (which will be available if you’ve finished his first quest and have started your journey in Mount Bloom).

As always, especially with new systems, we’re eager to hear your input on these changes to the potion system. There are a bunch of potions to test, and we’re interested to hear how you feel about the effects: are they powerful enough compared to the recharge time? Is it satisfying to recharge potions in battle? Are you more inclined to use potions now, or did you prefer the old system?

A lot of you have waited a long time for some kind of healing spell or health pot, and health potions are now available!! So let us know how you feel about that as well.

The full patch notes are available here, so be sure to check them out if you’re interested in the specifics! And do let us know how you feel about this new system (and the new quests), either on our forums or here in a comment. We look forward to hearing all of your feedback!

Now, let’s turn back time and take a look at what we’ve been up to last week:

So as we we’re drawing ever closer to finishing up the whole potion business, it’s time to pump out a bunch of new portraits to fit in with Remedi’s new questline which will grant you the empty bottles you need to use this new mechanic!

First up is his old man version, which will be the original form in which you meet him, rather than the kid-self you’re probably used to right now:

He won’t stay this way for long though, as that pesky accident with a stray potion has him transformed back to his ‘regular’ form. Unfortunately, with our tweaks to this storyline it seems he won’t stay very long in that shape either… ;)

Now, what in the world is this?! A portrait of a cave troll? What is it doing here? What part will it have in our story? For now, all I’ll say is that it’s related to the potion quests, and will appear in this patch!

Unfortunately I had to cut all of its back or it wouldn’t fit the text box without covering the letters! Oh well… :D

Finally, some finishing touches before I’m done with my parts for this patch! First up, the Speed and Loot potions mentioned before:

…which of course also were in need of proper interface icons:

I also made small versions of each of the icons, to serve as buff icons / timers for the potions that work over time (and whatever else we might need them for)!

Then, there’s another portrait for poor Remedi, who will go through quite a number of shapes in his quest to return to his original form. Here’s the pumpkin version:

Aaand a bunch of expressions for his Nephew, as well as an icon for refilling potions in Remedi’s workshop:

Like me and Teddy, Fred too has been busy doing potion stuff this week as well!

As Remedi got a new, older self, his first mission was to make the old man version of the sprite, to go with the new portrait. As usual, when deciding on a look for a new sprite, he made a whole bunch of iterations until we selected our favorite:

Which one do you like best?

Next, we need Remedi’s nephew to do some pretty advanced stuff in the upcoming new quest, so he needed a few new animations as well:

And finally, a ton of potion effects for when you drink those pots, signalling to the player what effect is about to happen:

Another week has passed, during which Fred has been busy finishing up the Solem…

.., and starting work on his part of the whole potion business! This includes a sprite and animation for a new character who will stand outside the potion shop with a signpost. This way we hope people will easily come across him and learn how to get a bottle on their way to the Pumpkin Woods and Flying Fortress:

Next up will be more potion stuff, as we’ve decided to change some things around with Remedi’s quest, and add another one where you’ll get the second bottle. A sneak peek of what’s going to happen:

Excited? We sure are! In fact, most of this week has been about potions in their various forms as we’ve prototyped, tested, made changes, and tested some more! In the beginning of the week we had a meeting where Teddy showed us his basic prototype of the system and wanted to discuss it with us.

To refresh your memory, the potion rework is about giving you three bottles that you can fill with one potion each. After you drink a potion, the bottle will refill slowly as you battle enemies. This was the basic prototype added by Teddy, but unfortunately he did not feel it was very fun, and after trying it out as well, me and Fred agreed – to an extent.

In fact, for a while we talked about scrapping the potion rework altogether!

However, after playing around with the system (Teddy also included settings which allowed us the change the speed of which a potion recharges, their duration, as well how big of an effect they have), we found that we’d been looking at it the wrong way, making it too difficult to recharge the potions.

Basically, in our first iteration, you got quite a large effect but refilling the bottles (done only by battling enemies) took forever, and felt more like a chore. So instead, we decided to reduce the effect quite significantly, but have the recharge process be much faster. We also decided to add a passive refill that slowly refills the bottles for you even when you’re not in battle. This way it doesn’t feel like you’re losing out on refill time when you move from one group of enemies to the next.

We’ve also decided on what potions we want to have, which so far is a lineup of nine:

* Health Potion – refills a tiny portion of your health
* EP Potion – restores your EP
* DMG Potion – Increases the damage you do for a short duration
* Crit Potion – Increases crit chance for a short duration
* Gold Potion – Increases gold droprate for a short duration
* Arrow Potion – Increases the number of arrow that drops
* Loot Potion – Increases drop rate of items
* Speed Potion – Increases your cast and attack speed

And finally, the most important one:

* Chicken Potion – Turns the player into a chicken!

Yes, we’re serious about that one. Might not be very useful (or will it?), but fun at the very least!

Okay, time for the next step in our potion-centric week! Starting with the basic UI where you assign which potions you want to carry with you on your journey. To my help with this I had a little sketch we made over at our meeting where we discussed these things:

Using the buff- and Frosty Friend interface arrows as a base, I made a version that will feature the potions. These arrows will not only appear in the Assign Potion interface, but will also appear around the character in the same way as when you command Frosty Friend or buff a friend with your utility skills:

After selecting which of your potion slots you want to change, you’re brought down to a shop-like list where all the potions will be displayed. Right now there are prices beneath the potions, but in the version we’re aiming for, swapping potions will be free of charge and can be done anytime (all of the potions will be unlocked from the beginning).

Also the menu may not look exactly like this when it’s done, but it’s close to what we’re aiming for:

Next up, the portrait of that new character! So the guy outside the potion shop is the nephew of Remedi the Alchemist. As mentined, he will appear in Evergrind City carrying a signpost directing you to his uncle’s shop. He’s also the one to notify you about Remedi giving out a free bottle to adventurers! What a nice kid, huh?

Next, time to get some more interface done. This time we’ll take a look at what the player will see more often, i.e. the interface that will appear as you drink your potions. Using the arrows from before, here’s what they will look like in action:

And now, it’s time for an indicator showing how long you have left before your potion(s) have been refilled:

These bottles will appear filled when ready to use, or will refill in real time as you battle enemies or just wait around. In the finished version we’ll try making the top row of pixels a little darker to make it more clear how much recharge time is left:

Now, as for the potions, I will remake all of them in a fresh new style, using our talent icon as base, but making it smaller so it better fits inside the UI arrows:

Each potion will have their own color, and as they appear in the arrow another icon will indicate their effect, making it easier to distinguish between the different potions even when they are of similar color:

The Speed and Loot potions aren’t pictured here because as I was making these, we hadn’t decided they would be included yet! They will appear in next week’s post instead, so stay tuned for that~

This week we return our focus to the Arcadia Rework! Starting with the usual reminder of where we left things off last:

The first thing on my new fixlist was to make the shape of the arena more rounded:

Then, it was painting paths all day! So many paths! Even with a lot of copy & pasting, this took forever, haha:

After the paths were done, it’s time to add water and the edges around town:

…and the background, kind of bringing everything together! Now all that’s left is a ton of trees, flower, smaller decorations – and to make the version of town that hasn’t been built upon yet! The goal of new Arcadia will be for you to unlock all of this, after all.

So here we go, time to add the last pieces. For instance, the bridge that will connect the right land mass to the left, once you unlock it:

And then……. Trees and flowers!!! So many! With this step, the fully unlocked version of Arcadia is done (aside from any other minor fixes we might decide to add). Of course, in this version there are no animation or NPCs added yet, but that will happen in the game engine:

Now it’s time to demolish everything and make the not unlocked version of each of the plots you can purchase on your journey! Starting off with Remedi’s wagon, which will be nothing but a pile of dirt to begin with:

Each of the plots you’ll be able to unlock/purchase will have their own signpost, so I decided to make a new version of the extremely old sprite we’ve been using so far. Should probably replace the one in Story Mode with this one later on, though it might stand out next to the old background graphics, I suppose:

As for the grand fae tree, it too will start off rather small… as a sapling:

There will be more tiny details added here and there in this version, where nothing has been unlocked yet, plus there will be wood covering certain areas you’ll have to unlock as well. For now, this is what things look if you’ve unlocked all the areas (except the bridge) but not bought any plots yet:

Now, as we decided a while back, only a small part of Arcadia will be available from the beginning, and the remaining three parts will have to be unlocked: one by building a bridge, and the other two by clearing out trees. As such, this is actually what the town will look like from the beginning:

And below are two versions where just one of the remaining areas have been unlocked by clearing out the woods:

Now, in order to make things look a little more interesting around some of the unbuilt plots, we decided to put in some random props, pieces of wood, boxes and the like, to help signify that these areas are a work in progress until you’ve purchased them. So below it’s decorating time, starting with the Farm, moving on to the Aquarium, the Bank, and finally the Arena:

And now, here’s the version of the map where all the plots are visible but none has been bought:

And with this, I believe the outdoors of the Arcadia rework is more or less complete! Wohoo!! Of course, we still need to make a bunch of interiors, but still :)

So to finish this week, I’m throwing in another portrait for the desert crew today, once more playing around with rendering techniques for the final (small) version of the portrait:

Next week will be all about potions and the potion rework! Stay tuned :)

Good news everyone: the Bow and Talent patch is officially live (and has been since Thursday afternoon)! Go try those things out and let us know what you think. To summarize, the patch includes 21 new talents, sound effects for the utility skills and the revamped bow including a bunch of upgrades! As always, the full patch notes can be found over here~

In Fred’s department, there has been three main things going on: making the bow upgrading NPC, continuing polishing the Solem animations and starting work on our next system upgrade, namely the potion rework. Once the rework is live your character will visually drink the potions, so that had to have a neat animation of its own. Here are some results from this week:

My main focus last week was also preparing stuff for the patch, starting with the final batch of talent icons! Final three General talents + the Melee talents:

Alchemist – Potions refill faster. Pretty self explanatory talent, and to make things even easier to understand visually I used the other potion talent icon as a base for this one.

Arrow Scavenger – Increases the number of arrows dropped by enemies. Featuring a bunch of arrows (or the ends of them anyway)!

Quickshot – Shoot arrows faster. For this icon I took one of the bow icons and put some effects behind it that I hope illustrates its increased speed!

Blood Thirst – Killing an enemy grants increased attack speed for a short duration. With a name like this I kind of wanted to make a blood thirsty animal or beast of some sort. Not super sold on the look, so might change it around in the future – we’ll see!

Combo Starter – After a normal attack, your melee skills have increased critchance for a short duration. Since we already have a ton of basic looking swords in the old talent icon, I went with a different kind of blade this time!

Knowledge is Power – MATK gives ATK. Using a book from another talent icon as a base, I changed its color around, making this icon’s color scheme a mix between magic colors and melee colors.

Riposte – Perfect guarding within x range of an enemy deals some damage to the enemy you guarded against. Bringing back the perfect guard icon to use it as a base once more, I changed the colors around to better work with the melee page.

Sudden Strike – After being out of combat for a short while, your next normal attack will have increased attackspeed. Here we have another regular-looking blade, but dropping from the sky this time!

Final lineup:

So in order for you to be able to upgrade your bow, we needed someone who can help you do that! While Robin, who first gives you the bow, might seem the obvious choice, we didn’t want him responsible for more than one mechanic – and as he’s currently in charge of the shooting mini-game, it seemed it’d be a better idea to make another character who can deal with bow upgrades.

Introducing Little J:

This guy will be carving bows outside Robin’s house. Once he has a new upgrade for your bow you’ll be able to purchase it for some gold!

After some feedback from my fellow Pixel Ferrets, I made a small adjustment of the eyes:

And next, it was time to actually make Little J feel at home next to Robin’s hut! In order to make it more obvious that there’s something for the player to gain by talking to this guy, we made a bunch of improvements to the surrounding area. Starting with some sketching:

First thing we’ll do is add a notice board of sorts, where the next bow upgrade available will be displayed. Here I’m using the notice board from the Arcadia rework as a base:

Now that the board is done, it’s time to bring in the bows and edit them all slightly so they merge better with the board. The very first bow won’t be on display since that will be the one you’ll have from the beginning (and the first upgrade will be available from the start):

Next, some ground decorations: a bunch of arrows, and a quiver next to Robin’s door:

Finally, Little J’s working table, where an old bow and some arrows lie forgotten:

And here’s Robin’s place after the added stuff! You can kind of see a difference in quality of the props made now compared to the old ones. Maybe someday (when the game is done), we’ll go back and touch up old areas, improving the overall graphics. For now, we’ll try to steer clear of doing too unnecessary improvements, as we want to finish this game within our lifetime:

As some of you have noticed, we also (finally) made a cover image for Secrets of Grindea on Twitch. It’s been on my to-do list for a while, but has been pushed back due to other things being more important – but with this bow upgrade being mostly out of the way, I decided to throw something together before moving back to Arcadia stuff.

So to make the cover image, we wanted to use graphics already available to us, at least for now. Maybe in the future we’ll do something more epic. Using the capsule image from Steam and a screenshot of the Arcadia rework, we pieced some graphics together and made a couple of mockups which can be viewed below (pretending to be Path of Exile).

We resized our mockups on top of other games in order to get a feel for what the image would actually look like in the end – you’re supposed to provide them with a quite large jpeg file, though for the most part its resized by Twitch as seen below. We felt the best way of trial and erroring this was playing around in Photoshop rather than uploading 500 versions of the image and trying it our in real time:

In the end, we decided to go with the third one. The big version can be seen below! Note that the logo has been resized into a bigger version in a rather crude way, which means it’s a little blurry. This is because we didn’t want to completely remake it and take more time from doing actual game stuff at this point. Since the image is mostly viewed in a much smaller version where the blur won’t be visible anyway, we felt this was OK for now:

With the Talent and Bow updates drawing to a close, it’s time to look ahead and start planning for the rest of the Arcadia Rework. I’m almost done with the rework of the outdoors, but after that there’s still some important stuff left: the indoors.

To make sure we’re on the same page, we got together to discuss exactly what will be available in each of the buildings, coming up with the list below:

Inside the Dojo there will be enough space for a small battle area, where your challenges will take place. Beyond it, Master Ji from story mode will sit, and it’s him you’ll have to talk to in order to activate the challenges. Once you activate a challenge, your character will be teleported to the battle area you just passed through.

In multiplayer, you’ll only be able to do these challenges solo. To make sure everyone can use the Dojo at the same time, characters who are currently partaking in the challenge will disappear from the map, meaning – unfortunately – that you can’t spectate other users as they do their challenges. In this case we felt it would be better for players to be able to take on the challenges at the same time rather than having to wait for someone currently doing one to finish.

The interior of the Farm will be pretty straight forward: hay, buckets and sacks of wheat. And enough space for your favorite farmer, Oak to give you new quests!

The Aquarium will feature a huge aquarium on the topside wall, around which painted decorations featuring seaweed and fishes will be added. We’re currently discussing what kind of fishes will be available in the aquarium, whether all of the fishes will be or just one or two from each area. We’re kind of into the idea of having one fish per area (meaning less animation work for Fred), each which you’ll be able to catch and keep during a quest given by the Aquarium owner.

The Bank will be decorated office style. Desks, water coolers, the occasional plant. A vault where the gold is kept!

The Cinema will look pretty much like a cinema, with a receptionist selling tickets near the entrance. This will be where you select which replay you want to watch.

The Inn will look much like it does now, some sitting areas and a bar. The Arena reception will look much like it does in Story Mode as well.

The Clock Tower will have a rather small, round, room, with a window on the opposite wall where you’ll be able to tell what time of day it is. You’ll change time by hitting a small bell in the middle of the room, which will – through magic – cause time to speed up. The big bell on top on the clock tower will chime as the scenery changes outside the window through an animation made by Fred.

And that’s that! Looking forward to diving into all of that soon~ :3