After a few weeks of vacation and rest, we’ve been itching to get back to work! First of, we would like to thank all of you who played the beta and took time to write your first impressions. We’ve been going over all the feedback and there’s been tons of useful suggestions from everyone. We’ve already decided upon a few big changes, revamping the early parts of the game a bit to make the story more present being one of them. So once again, thank you.

In other work related news!
With just a few animations missing here and there, the Winterland enemies are getting very close to completion. Below are some animations for the Christmas present enemy we showed a while back.

We’ve also decided to add another version of the Christmas present in form of a ranged, green sibling.

We hope you have all enjoyed this summer as much as we have! Stay tuned for more updates and weekly recaps as usual from now on :)

Hello guys! This week we’ve been busy finishing off the last remaining things in and around the dungeon. There are still some tweaks we’d like to add, but for now the dungeon is complete and ready to be tested!

This means that at long last, it’s time to update the beta! To celebrate this new patch we’re gonna invite a bunch of new people that get to try the game out – hopefully you’re among them! :)

The beta should be uploaded before the end of the week, and invites will be sent shortly after. If you haven’t signed up for beta access yet, be sure to post a message in this thread over at Desura to have a chance of being selected!

Now, we’re also moving on with more stuff for the winter fields which we’ve shown you previously! It won’t be included in this patch, but here’s another sneak peek of what you’ll find there:

Yeti death animation!

A special attack which will freeze you if you’re not careful!

A bunch of random drops

One of the secrets we’re most excited about adding to Grindea are the microbosses!

Microbosses are unique enemies that are usually related to the normal mobs in some way, but are way stronger. A tiny taste of this that’s currently in the beta is the white rabby. 

He might look cute and fluffy, but he’s the #2 cause of death in the game

Most players enjoy the addition of the white rabby, but he’s not quite as interesting as we want most microbosses to be, since he has no extra moves except some tweaked base properties (more mobility, more health, more damage, more stun resistance etc).

During the past week, one of Fred’s tasks has been to create a microboss we hope will be a better example of what we want to achieve: the Frostling Leader!

 

The Frostling Leader will have a moveset inspired by the two regular Frostling monsters, the melee Rogue and the ranged Scoundrel. Our hope is to have it nearly as interesting to fight as a full fledged miniboss, but with way less workload regarding the visual design. A win-win situation if we ever heard of one!

One of our game’s big selling points have been a lively atmosphere made possible through tons of flavor animations. In that spirit, the snowlands have been coming to life with some new NPC animations over the past week!

Santa isn’t quite santa unless he’s laughing

Scotty is shoveling an impressive amount of snow outside of his cabin

You can make the world come alive with other things than just NPCs!
Squirrels, for example

Apart from this, Fred also recorded a short video explaining the role of Puzzle Skills in Secrets of Grindea!

This week, we’re continuing our efforts to put new skills into the game! This time we’ve been focusing on the one-handed weapon skills, and put together two entirely new ones for you to try out!

The first one is a spell which summons shadow clones of yourself who will follow you around and deal damage to whatever you hit with your normal attacks.

Click for animated gif!

On level one you’ll get a single clone which deals 33% of your normal attack damage, and at level two you’ll gain another clone which deals 25% of your damage. The spell type works pretty much like the Cloud Strike spell for now: after you cast it once it reserves part of your mana pool and stays active until you cast it again.

The second spell is an area of effect spell in which your character channel his or her inner power and deal damage to all enemies within a target circle.

Clickety-click!

As you level this skill you’ll notice that the target circle becomes bigger and that you’ll be able to hit the enemies within it an additional number of times.

Next up we hope to finally finish the dungeon, so get ready for some epic boss battle(s)!

Another week has past by with some decent progress being made! Teddy has been away to act as yet another judge, this time for the Swedish Game Awards which we happened to win last year. Best of luck to all the participants!

Vilya has been busy adding more touch ups to Mount Bloom. Below is a picture of an area that will hold one of the many side quests Mount Bloom has to offer. Crystal mining is risky business, even for seasoned Collectors!

Fred has been working on animations for a couple of upcoming skills, mainly from the One Handed Weapons-tree. Below are some effects for one of the new skills, at the moment named “Shadow Clone“.

We’ll hopefully be able to talk more in depth about them next week when they’ve been properly implemented into the game.

Time for another recap! This week we’ve been finishing off the boss, which is now playable in single player! Still no pics though, no spoilers here. What we can show, however, is this:

Some cute idle animations made for the enemy from last week, the Frostlings! As you can see they have already selected their weapons of choice, which tells a bit of how they work in the game. As you may have guessed, the fellow with the snowball is a ranged version, while the one with the stick will fight you up close.

We’ve also decided to make a change in the game as you know it right now: We’re removing the health potions!

Why? Because they simply didn’t contribute that much to begin with! In our game you respawn pretty much directly where you died, so dying isn’t a terrible thing. Having a bunch of health potions in the game means you’ll die less, but does that really matter when your death isn’t that much of a punishment? The only place where the health pots would make a difference is in boss fights and challenges where you’ll have to replay the entirety of the fight when you die.

Edit: To clarify, you don’t respawn on the spot when you die, you respawn at the start of the current map with everything reset. The thing that killed you, and everything before it, will be alive and at full health!

Lastly, the skill needed to use health potions isn’t proportional to the significance they have in battle. If using all of your health pots give you the equivalent of your Max HP, then using potions effectively doubles your survivability.

This also means that a player who forgets to use them (many do) will have a fight that’s twice as difficult! The balance issues this creates seems a bit unnecessary for something that isn’t exactly a part of the core gameplay.

Seeing it in this light also makes you realize how dull it truly is to go back and forth to town just to stack up on some more pots. What do you guys think?

Now, as you may notice, the blog looks a bit empty today! That’s because Vilya has been busy travelling to Sweden from her secret lair in the Netherlands and therefore hasn’t been able to polish anything enough to show in the blog. She’s still working on the cave system, which we’ll see more of in the near future, as well as some details in the winter area that are yet to be made.

The reason she’s coming to Sweden at this time is because the entire Pixel Ferrets crew has been invited to judge this year’s GGC competition where the students present their game projects. The conference is held in Visby, Gotland on June 4th-5th. We expect it to be a blast, and is also a nice opportunity for the three of us to hang out face to face for a couple of days.

Will we see any of you there?

This week, we have finished up one of the last enemy designs for the Winterland. As of now we call them Frostlings!

They are agile little creatures with a taste for mischief. Avoiding to get hit and blocking are preferred when fighting these little trouble makers since they have a habit of stealing gold from Collectors venturing through the Winterland! If they nab some of your cash, you’ll have to whack them with something hard before they escape with your life savings.

These cuties will probably pop up during one of Fred’s streaming sessions in the near future, getting some animation work done together with the rest of the Winterland enemy lineup!

Teddy has spent some time reworking how resetting puzzles work. Instead of our old “instant reset” we’ve implanted a sort of Braid-like system. Besides looking way cooler, this allows players to undo single moves instead of fully resetting the puzzle when caught in a deadlock.

Before:

After:

Click the pictures to view the animated GIFs.

Besides all the secret cool stuff we are currently working on, Fred has been hard at work in the effects workshop. Below is a new animation for when the player receives special items/powers as well as a mixed bag of other effects!

Hello again and welcome to yet another weekly recap! We’re still fighting on with the dungeon, with Teddy implementing the last things before fine-tuning sessions and multiplayer edits.

Vilya has revisited some of the maps of the dungeon this week as well, improving its overall look and feel. As an example, here’s one of the outdoor maps before the improvements:

And here’s a couple of shots after:

As we’ve been stressing – it’s all in the details, and visual improvements will most likely keep being implemented all over the world of Grindea when there’s time.

When it comes to the animation department, Fred started working on the Yeti enemy we showed a few weeks back. Below are some idle animations created during a streaming session from last night.

Shout out to everyone who tuned in and kept him company, we’re gonna be doing streams a bit more often in the future since Fred has upgraded his 4 year old laptop to one of Teddy’s 4 year old desktops!

If you want to be notified when the stream starts, make sure to subscribe to Fred’s twitch channel here.

In other animation news, there’s also a level 3 version of the Summon Plant spell! As you could probably guess, it has increased range compared to the lower levels, and of course it also deals more damage.

However, perhaps the most important feature is its increased cuteness:

Last but not least, we’re very excited to have received our very first fan art! This piece was made by Crispat87 during the streaming session last night.

Thanks a lot man, we really appreciate it! :D

This week, we’ve been squeezing in some new magic spells into the game! If you’re a returning reader, you’ve probably seen some graphics of a couple of them.

Click the pictures to view them as animated images!

Here’s a Chain Lightning spell, working pretty much in the classic way! It will hit the closest enemy in front of you (and in range), and will then jump to new enemies until the max amount of jumps has been reached, or there are no more enemies to jump to.

Next is a Meteor spell, which has the same targeting system as the Earth Spike. However, unlike the Earth Spike, there’s a slight delay before it hits, so you need to plan ahead. On the plus side, it hits like a truck (that’s crashing down from the sky)!

Lastly, here’s the Plant Summon in action! Unlike the Cloud, you can summon a bunch of these babies, but they are stationary and can’t follow you around. Use them like traps and bait enemies into them!

Meanwhile in Fairyland, more portraits have been raining in! Here’s the Summer Elder, worried that winter will never end:

And here’s a regular Summer Fae, sharing her elder’s discomfort with the sudden cold snap:

As this week’s parting gift, please accept this little animation of a Brawler Bot waking up from a long, long slumber!