Last week, we talked briefly about the translation tool Teddy have been working on for quite some time. This week, we are happy to announce that the tool is live and ready for testing! If you are interested in trying it out, we’ve set up a forum section with some in depth guides and information about how it all works. Keep in mind that the tools is still very much in beta, so watch out for any evil bugs and glitches!

Fred have kept the focus on bringing the ever so unlikable Marino to life, so you guys can finally beat some sense into him! For anyone who haven’t guessed it yet, Marino will act as one of the upcoming boss fights in the game and will focus heavily on quick sword attacks, dashes and dodges. Players will have to keep their shield close at hand and try to find openings in between his barrage of slashes.

Below are a few of his many new animations, along side his new and improved portrait by Vilya!

Last week was all about PR, customer service and whittling down a horde of bugs, but now things are finally starting to look kind of normal around here! As such, we’ve actually gotten some “new” stuff done.

A couple of days ago we added a feature which we’ve mentioned before on the blog but never got around to implement, namely the memory room!

Many of our bosses drop items just like regular enemies, and will eventually also drop cards. This creates a little Collector’s dilemma, where if you don’t get every drop the first time you defeat a boss, you’ll have eternal holes in your item codex for all eternity! That is of course unacceptable in a modern society, and that’s how the memory room came to be.

For every boss you defeat in the game, you’ll unlock a statue in the Memory Room. By interacting with it, you can then choose to relive the battle in order to farm items you didn’t get the first time around.

Currently, the feature isn’t very balanced since the boss drops are both strong and worth a lot of money. That worked well when the boss items were rare, but less so if you can fight them an infinite number of times! While the economic aspect can be solved by making the items sell for less money, the issue of having easily farmable but very strong items is a bit more tricky.

There are a bunch of ways to deal with this, though. One is to simply add a fee to battle memories, so you can’t fight over and over without cost.

Another is to adjust drop rates when in a memory battle. Boss drops have pretty high drop rates to compensate for the fact you only fight a boss once, and we’d like to keep it that way for when you meet them on your natural journey through the game but obviously it doesn’t work when you can farm the bosses.

A third option is to rethink the drops which bosses have, and only focus on either flavor drops (style hats, furniture, etc) or crafting materials that require at least another rare material. That way we’ll prevent having boss farming be the be all end all way of getting certain gear upgrades. We’ll play around with it until we get something that feels nice!

Marino, our Gary of the game, has received quite a make over! The main reason for this was that the old sprite looked a lot like the officials of the Collector’s Headquarter, something we wanted to avoid to set him apart more.

Since Marino is a recurring character, he needed to be able to do more interesting stuff than just walking around being smug. Below are a few animations foreshadowing things to come!

This week, as you can probably imagine, we’ve been pretty busy with preparing for the upcoming pre-order! We just updated the beta with what we hope will turn out to be a stable build we can use for the pre-order launch.

Besides all the administrative work (setting humble widgets up, making the pre-order site, etc), we’ve still hammered away quite a bit on the game! For one, we’ve added a new little main quest to the Pumpkin Woods, to make players experience the atmosphere a bit more before moving on to the temple. If you’re in the beta and have som spare time, please try the quest out and share your thoughts on the forums! It’s supposed to be played between the exams and the first temple, story wise.

We’ve also worked a bit on removing some player confusion. First off, pets now have a small aura so they can be distinguished from their bloodthirsty, farmable counterparts:

We tried to keep it subtle yet noticable, so you’ll
know what cute things to murder!

Another thing that wasn’t all that clear to player is that you can jump down certain ledges! To help with this, we’ve added small arrows that appear when you get close to a ledge from which you can jump down. If this doesn’t work, we’ll probably have to implement escalators instead.

Wait, how did he get up there without turning off the bullets?!

Apart from this, Vilya has kept on updating portraits to the new style! Here are a couple of them, step by step:

As for Fred, he’s been working on some juicy animations for the new quest as well as the enemies of the Season Change Temple, who are slowly but surely being brought to life! The knight has taken its first steps while the Wizard is doing his best not using feet at all.

With the beta now up and running on Steam, feedback and bug reports have been flowing in like never before, to Teddy’s combined delight and despair! In times like these, the ability to quickly roll out patches on Steam really shines. In fact, it’s so easy to update that a better way of delivering patch notes was in order. As such, one of the week’s additions to the game is an in-game patch note viewer!

Whenever the game has updated and there’s new patch notes, a notice will appear on the start menu informing you about this. By pressing Tab, you can access all recorded patch notes.

The game records when you played it last, and if you have missed more than one update, you’ll have an option to aggregate the patches. This will create a combined patch note showing every addition, change and bug fix in all patch notes since the last time you played, allowing you to catch up easily!

Fred has stepped away from the flavor and NPC-crafting (for now) and started working on some new enemies. Below are some of the enemies that will pop up in the upcoming Season Change Temple (working title).

Like the name implies, changing seasons will be the main focus of the Season Change Temple. Player will be able to change season between Fall, Winter and Summer (spring is excluded for a reason!) with each season affecting the dungeon both visually and gameplay wise.

The season change-ability will be the main ingredient of the puzzles of the dungeon, but it will also effect the enemies within it. As seen above, every enemy comes in 3 different versions that each represents a different season. For example, changing the season to Summer will boost the stats of all summer enemies as well as allow them to use certain skills. The same goes for the other seasons!

To round things up, here’s the idle animation for the Summer Knight!

Just like last week, this week’s post will be pretty short and to the point! To start things off Fred has kept hammering away at flavor and environment animations for the HQ as well as the rest of Evergrind City.


Vilya kept working on the portraits, so here’s another of those ‘step-by-step’ thingies, this time featuring Plott the commentator:

Steam Beta Update:

Teddy has been spending most of his time in the workshop fixing bugs in pursuit of a reasonably stable Steam Release, and as a result, it’s finally ready to be rolled out to all current beta users who’ve left feedback! We’ve already sent messages on IndieDB to everyone who’ve posted  a “first impression” over at the IndieDB-forum.

If you have posted bug reports, videos or feedback elsewhere, please contact us through Desura or IndieDB and we’ll give you your Steam key!

This week we’re switching back from Arcade Mode again to work on skills!

Do you remember the snow summon called Frosty Friend, which Fred has worked on for some time? At last, the time has come for it to appear inside the game!

Click to view an animated gif!

This is a pretty early prototype, but the foundation works pretty well! As we mentioned a while back, this summon differs from the other two in that it’s a physical participant in the combat, and as such it can take damage as well as deal it. This also means that we must handle how the summon dies, and recovers HP. We’ll definitely have to test and iterate our way to the best solution, but we can share some of the ideas we’re going to try out first.

When the snow creature dies, it will get knocked out from the fight, lying dazed until its owner resurrects it. The resurrection mechanic works just like in multiplayer. That is, you’ll have to stand still beside your pet for four seconds to wake it up. Your pet will regain health automatically in time when it’s out of combat, and become fully healed when you zone. Unsummoning your pet will flag it as out of combat, but it will still take some time to recover health. A knocked out pet cannot be unsummoned.

Skills have been the name of the game in the animation department as well, wrapping up the last animations for the Frosty Friend amongst other things.

The multiplayer implementation of the Arcade Mode is almost complete, and we’ve had a long, sweaty testing session in the “office” today! We could’ve streamed it over at Fred’s Twitch channel, but we didn’t think of that until we were nearly finished. However, we’ll probably test it some more in the coming days and we’ll try to remember to stream it then so everyone can watch us fail miserably at our own game! :D

On the subject of streams, Fred has begun streaming on his previously mentioned channel again! Since he might be streaming pretty often, we won’t be posting the link on Facebook each time,  so we recommend anyone interested in watching him do animation work to follow him on Twitch or us over on Twitter.

Anyway, back to Arcade Mode. As always, we’re making an effort to make multiplayer as interesting as the single player experience. The monster scaling carries over automatically from the Story Mode, but we’re also modifying encounters and room sizes to better accommodate the number of players in the game.

To avoid having players becoming more powerful as an effect of the increased enemy count, the drop rates are adjusted to make it comparable to how much money and loot a single player would’ve received. Speaking of loot, a huge difference in the Arcade Mode compared to the Story Mode is that clients receive their own loot, kind of like how it is in Diablo 3. This is to avoid having a single player accidentally (or intentionally) take all the good loot, and it also leads to a lot greater diversity in how players build!

The resurrection system is also altered, disabling in-combat resurrection completely. Instead, any players that die will automatically revive with 1 HP when a room is cleared! This might seem harsh, but since health is the most valuable resource in the Arcade Mode, having regular resurrection would be very powerful as it constitutes a form of healing.

To round things off, here’s an animation from an upcoming skill with the hugely creative work name “Berserker Mode“!

Happy new year guys!

We hope you’ve all had a great Christmas as well as a good start to the new year! The three of us took some needed time off and spent some quality time with friends and family, absorbing energy to make this year as productive as we possibly can. Hopefully all the amazing support you’ve given us during last year will carry over to 2014!

Since we pretty much just landed from the holidays we don’t have much too show this week, but we’ve managed to scramble together something!

We’re doing our best to give each area in the Arcade Mode its own unique challenges, and the Flying Fortress is no different! These little trinkets will take the torch from thorns and beehives at making adventurers’ lives miserable.

The yellow crystal will continuously spawn new random enemies until it’s destroyed, while the red flying thingamajig is part of a bullet hell challenge (a recurring theme during the dungeon in Story Mode)!

Meanwhile in code land… Arcade Mode multiplayer takes its first steps!

Hey all!

This week, we’ve added a couple of new floors to the Arcade Mode, based on the Flying Fortress. This has opened up some interesting enemy combinations, as well as challenges (such as perfect guard training and bullet hell dodging). Here’s a screen of an outside room on the 7th floor:

Apart from that, we’re also trying out an updated way of showing damage numbers. We’ve gotten feedback from many testers that say it’s sometimes a bit difficult to see if you take damage during chaotic fighting because the damage numbers look the same regardless if they come from an enemy or a player.

To mitigate this, we’ve made the color of enemy damage white, and kept the player damage red. Since shield damage used to be gray, we’ve changed those to blue! It’s a bit weird at first when you’re used to the old system, but after a while it feels okay again :P

Fred has been getting into the holiday mood by continuing to animate the frosty friend! Below is a charged up version of the summon. Not as cute, but packs more of a punch!

Howdy neighbor!

This week we’ve continued the effort to fill out all the empty spots in the skill trees (or skill planes), and have two to show off!

The first one is called Dodging Strike, a skill we hope will further increase the nimble feeling of the one handed route. When you press the skill button, you immediately dash backwards, landing in the charge stance several paces away. When you release the button, you will rush forward to your initial position, damaging anything in your way.

Click to view an animated gif!

It doesn’t do much good to just use it randomly and attack enemies that come near though. The base damage is pretty meager, and the cost and charge time for higher levels are both high. However, if you successfully dodge an attack with the backdash, the attack will become empowered. You will deal bonus damage, your charge speed is doubled and the cost for higher charge levels are greatly reduced. In a sense, it’s a bit like the perfect guard.

The second hasn’t been implemented yet, but Fred has animated pretty much everything it needs. It’s called Frosty Friend and is the third and final summoning spell we’ve got planned for the game. It’s also the only summon that physically partake in combat! That is, it will move around fighting enemies, and it can be attacked by enemies as well.

Since it works very differently from the cloud or the plants, we still have to work out some details. For instance, how smart it should be, what kind of control the player should have, its engagement range and, perhaps most importantly, what should happen when the creature is defeated. We’re considering to either give it a set timer for how long it will remain incapacitated, or using the same resurrection system that we have in multiplayer (an ally must stand next to your ghost for 5 seconds).

Needless to say, it’s going to be interesting to implement, and there’s a lot of design details we will have to figure out after we’ve tried it out in game!

Apart from the occasional GUI assets, Vilya has been keeping up with the portrait makeover, giving many of the main story characters an updated look: