We got some pretty exciting news. We’ve been invited by our old school to tag along to Dreamhack Stockholm this coming weekend to showcase our game at the game expo!

This will be the first ever visit to a Dreamhack event for all of us and even though it’s not one of the big ones (Dreamhack Summer & Winter) we are all super pumped to showcase Grindea, talk to people and watch some e-sports! If you are in the neighborhood, drop by and hang out with us!

Anyways, the most common usage for the Season Change Ability will be to open up new paths to explore. For Fred, this means a lot of animations for different obstacles to block the progression for the players.

Most blockades will only be opened during a specific season and closed during the other two. The Phase Shift plate below for example will be blocked by the giant lily pad during the summer and frozen shut during the winter.

And to end this post, here’s a couple of the rooms that Vilya has been working with:

See you next week!

This week we’ve continued working on the Temple of Seasons. It will be one of the most graphically heavy areas of the game since both enemies and scenery will have three different variations, so our grahpic duo have wasted no time getting started!

Below is one of the early rooms of the temple in all of its autumny glory.

If you missed it a few weeks ago, Vilya have started up a workblog that goes a lot more indepth about the graphical assets she’s making, like the room seen above. Be sure to check it out!

Fred have spent the week finishing up all of the animations for the Summer varation of the Knight enemies we showed off a while ago. The Summer Knight will work as a base for both the Fall and Winter versions. Besides different weapons, each enemy will have their own set of unique moves they will have access to if the area is set to their season.

Above is the Summer Knights special move, a high damaging single target attack with Guard Crush (instantly destroys your shield if not perfect guarded) and a huge knockback.

Besides fancy special attack, the knights will be the first enemy in the game that uses shields. The enemy shields will work similar to player shields in terms that they have their own HP and can break if taking too much damage.

Fred is back in town, which means the animation machine is back up and running! We’re totally going to regret saying this, but we’ve got our aims set on updating the Frontline build before the end of the week.

The update will include a prototype of the Toy Factory mini-dungeon, as well as the Winterland enemies. Since we’ve focused on implemented the story parts, the area is pretty barren when it comes to quests and other stuff to do — that will come later, possibly even as late as with/around the Season Temple!

But this is all future talk. The Toy Factory isn’t quite completed yet, although Fred had dived straight back into making the animations Teddy needs to wrap it all up once they’re done:

Oh, and the Winterland-stuff isn’t the only thing in the update. Apart from some small changes and bug fixes, it’s going to contain a ton of updated portraits! Here are some more of them:

Lastly, Vilya is starting a work blog where she’ll post more stuff she’s making for the game and write about the production from her point of view. If you want to know more about how we work or simply enjoy following dev/artblogs, you should definitely head over there!

Even though this last week seemed to be the hottest in the history of Sweden, we have kept our sweat drenched focus on the Winterland. A while back we posted this out-of-control Christmas Gift Machine which was supposed to act as the boss of the Toy Factory.

This design was from the time when the Toy Factory was supposed to be a smaller side quest with only a simple boss encounter within it. Back then the idea was that it would work very similar to the Sentry encounter in the Flying Fortress. A very simple “kill the boss while it spawns a ton of enemies attacking you”-encounter.

Since the area itself have gone through such massive changes since we came up with the initial gameplay design for the boss, we had to rethink it a bit to make it up to standard with the rest of the area.

We all still liked the concept of having an Enraged Gift Machine as the boss of the area so we stuck to it. We only made more of it!

As the animation hints about, the trains from last week will play a part in the boss battle. It will play out more as a combat/puzzle-hybrid compared to other bosses so far and it will hopefully keep things fresh and interesting for you players!

We’ve also worked on a bunch of pretty extravagant cutscenes in the Toy Factory featuring everyone’s favorite best friend in the whole wide world, Luke. Don’t let the blonde locks fool you, homeboy can fight!

The outside of the Toy Factory Vilya put together last week went through the animation station! You’ll have to imagine the smoke puffs coming out of the chimneys, we’ll add those in game later on.

It’s not only the outside that have been getting some animations up and running. The insides of the factory will be filled with moving parts and machinery. We’ve tried to keep the technology a bit more crude compared to the Flying Fortress-tech, to keep the two separate in terms of setting.

The Toy Factory will work as a middle stop before players can head into the second temple, much like the Ghost Hunt quest in the Pumpkin Woods.

Compared to other areas in the game so far, the Toy Factory will focus a lot on different environmental hazards, traps and other challenges instead of just pure combat encounters. It will not be the size of a full blown temple, but should keep players on their feet before they can venture into the next temple!

To sate the curiosity of all Rodney Hahoos out there, here are some updated sales stats:

Copies Sold: 8038
Hats Sold: 1903
Current Pace: 0.75 copies/h

An interesting thing to note here is that, even now, almost 20 % of those buying the game also get the pre-order hat! Our players know what’s important!

This figure was around 25 % at the start, and we thought it would go down significantly when our long time followers had shown their support, but the hats are still quite popular!

This week we’ve continued to push ahead! Right now we’re working on an odd factory in the midst of the snowy fields we’ve been talking about recently. Here’s what the exterior looks like right now:

The Christmas Present, an enemy we’ve shown a while back, will be one of the many challenges lurking around within the Factory. Instead of normal projectiles, we’ve gone with a more explosive approach!

Aside from building the factory exterior, Vilya has also kept on remaking portraits. Here’s the latest batch of those, all inhabitants of the winter area:

With the latest Frontline update, the story is slowly but steadily starting to take a more central role. With that, some of the more important characters have been in need of some touch ups. Just like Marino, your friendly neighbor Luke has received a graphical update:

(Now, we know there are many more sprites that could use some touch-ups as well, but for now we’re only going to focus on characters that play some part in the main story. We want to keep pushing ahead, after all, and remaking too much would quickly turn into a time sink of black hole-ish proportions where we get better at drawing and remake graphics in a never-ending circle. Therefore we’ll try to save most touch-ups for the post-production, so bear with us until then!)

This week, we’ve managed to push out a new content update for the Frontline beta. The main focus of the update is the new Marino Encounter, as well as some new cut scenes setting up where the story is heading next.

The update is not massive in size but we are still very much interested in hearing feedback from you guys who are in the beta, especially about the Marino fight. Was it too hard, too easy, any suggestions how to make it more interesting?

The in house testing has been a bit all over the place ranging from it being “impossible” to “I’ve played this game so much I don’t even know if it’s hard”. We’ve set up a thread over at the forums where you can post any suggestions and thoughts you have about the fight, it would really help us a ton!

With this update out of the way, we are already hard at work with the next one. Below are the sprites for the rest of the Season Fae Elders, which all will play a crucial role during your visit in the Winterland!

The cutscenes have stayed in focus this week (to Teddys delight!) so Fred spent some quality time with the Master of the Collectors Headquarters which we showed last week, making her fit to enter the big stage!

Speaking of stage, of course the master has her own room in the HQ. What it looks like? We’re glad you asked! Here’s the place where you’ll find her:

She certainly has interesting taste in interior design..!

Other than creating this room, Vilya has also been making some new portraits. These guys are a bunch of Collector Scientists, working in the HQ:

On a whole different note, both Fred and Vilya just handed in their final school assignment for this semester. Thanks to all of you who’ve supported us by pre-ordering the game, they won’t have to continue their studies for at least another year! This not only means a whole lot of less stress in their life but it also means all of us will be able to focus whole heartedly on the game for now, which in short feels amazing. 

A big bunch of love to all of you who’ve made this possible!

Hello again folks! This week, we’ve been tinkering with the cutscenes around and after the little bonus Marino arc, where we’ll introduce a couple of new characters that will help move the story forward.

One of these is the Spring Fae, who’s still unnamed but we’re fairly certain it will be some sort of reference to the most famous of all sidekick fairies: Navi from Ocarina of Time!

While waiting for all flavor animations to be planned out, Fred went ahead and created the animations needed for a slightly… different puzzle block than people might be used to:

This week, we’ll take a couple of days off in order to be judges at this year’s Gotland Game Conference, which is basically a pretty cool event where the students at the school we’ve studied at showcase the games they’ve made. Usually there are some really neat stuff to be found (as well as some really bad stuff, of course, but that’s also kind of fun).

Speaking about school, we won’t have to study next semester thanks to all the folks who’ve pre-ordered! Thanks again!

Some people have asked how the pre-orders are going right now, so here are the current numbers:

Copies Sold: 7098
Hats Sold: 1713
Current Pace: 1.3 copies/h

Despite the game having been available for quite some time now, we sometimes get sales bumps from when streamers and YouTubers showcase our game, so thanks for spreading the word!

Now the most interesting metric is probably our estimated survival time based on how the sales have gone! What we know for sure is that we could sustain production for about 10-12 months on the sales we’ve made to date. Some sales are still trickling in, and we’re likely to see increased sales after major patch releases. We’re pretty confident that, thanks to all your support, we’ll be able to keep soldiering on without student loans until the game is finished!

The past week, the Marino battle has been the main implementation focus. Here’s a little teaser gif from it:

Clicketyclick!

For Marino, we wanted to create a battle that was more up close and personal than most other boss battles. In terms of style, it’s most similar to fighting Vilya, but this time it’s not part of some camouflaged tutorial. Marino is quick, slippery and will cut you up if you’re sloppy!

Speaking of boss battles, Fred is already at work with creating assets for another one, which will have the player face new challenges…

CHOO-CHOO, TRAINS YO!!