Beta Info

We’re happy to report that the first week of the beta has worked out really well! Our setup over at Desura/IndieDB is doing its job, and we’ve received lots of great feedback and bug reports!

Our thread where testers post their first impressions is a feedback gold mine, and if you’re a beta tester who’s reading this and haven’t posted there yet, please take a moment to do so!

At the time of writing, we’ve already patched the beta once based on the great community input, and are pushing out a second patch tonight.

Since things went according to plan, we’ll continue on the set track and send out an additional 30 invites as promised! We’ll send them out when the upcoming patch has been uploaded and authorized at Desura, which should hopefully be within a day or so. Again, we’re going to use the IndieDB messaging system, so if you’ve registered for the beta, check your IndieDB-messages!

 Production

A lot of effort have gone into polishing things we’ve got feedback on, and fixing bugs hunted down by our testers. But we have also spent some time adding new content for the game, which should be available in the coming patch.

To begin with, there will be some slight improvements of the Arena. We have refined the point system of the challenges, which now works as follows: Your best grades in every challenge will add up to a total score, and when that total reach certain key numbers, you gain unique items.

For instance, let’s say S is worth 500 and A is worth 300. Then you would have 800 points in total, should you have achieved rank S in one and A in another. If you later increase your A to an S you will earn the remaining 200 points, giving you a total of 1000.

In such a system, we could let players who aren’t super hardcore get a taste of the unique items as well by having a reward at 500 points (which you could get with two As), and a second one on 1000 points (which only the best can get, with two S ranks).

This might be very technical, but hopefully it will make sense to you in the game. Speaking of which, to reflect the new point system we have also improved the arena interface as such:

As you can see, you can now view your current points, which reward you’ll get next, and how many points each rank will give you.

If you’re curious on which the next 3 rewards will be, we have added a poster showing just that on the wall of the Arena Lobby:

Speaking of those rewards, here are some of the new hats offered, in action:

The first three will be offered as rewards in the arena, as you just saw, while the fish hat will replace the old reward for unlocking the Pillar Mountains fishing achievement.

Another improvement we added was effects for some of the potions currently offered in the game. This one will be shown when you drink the Damage Potion, which boosts both your normal attack and skill damage:

We also made one for the Gale Potion, which increases your attack- and castspeed:

That’s all for now! Hope to see you soon in the beta ;)

Beta Info

So we’re currently waiting for Desura to approve our latest build, and when they do, the beta will officially start! We were originally planning on inviting only a few people this week, to test things out, but due to the inspiring amount of interest, we’re going to increase that cap.

To give you an idea of how much it has overshot our expectations, we were expecting around 30 people at best, and we currently have 490 usernames in our list. On the plus side, this means the game will become better, since we’ll have a larger feedback group, but even though we’ll invite larger groups it still means the chances of getting in quickly is reduced somewhat.

So, to give you an idea, we’ll invite 15-20 people within the next couple of days. This is mainly to make sure the technical and administrative aspects work as we want them to, such as: Can random users download and start the game? Does our “First Impressions”-thread generate the information we want? Is there a need for more forum categories?

If things work out the way we want them, we’ll invite about 30 more people next week, and then we’ll keep inviting new people whenever we need some new feedback and “first impressions”. We’re not 100 % sure about the intervals yet!

The invites will be sent via Desura/IndieDB, so check your messages there if you’ve registered! You’ll be invited to a closed group as well as the game, which contains a forum for you to discuss the game with us and other users.

Production

Production wise, the past week has been much about adding some polish and trying to make sure the new stuff was ready for the Desura upload, as well as fleshing out the amount of quests to do, items to craft, and so forth!

Here’s one of the enemy cards you can find (Rabby):

And here’s some of the new fishes you can find in the various lakes!

As for animations, Fred decided to give the old chicken coop some flare for when you herd chickens into it. Yes, you heard right. We have chicken herding in the game!

As the majority probably already knows by now, Steam’s new submission system Greenlight launched last Thursday, and we were lucky enough to jump into the mix quite early. If you have a Steam account but haven’t voted for us yet, you can find our Greenlight profile by clicking the image below!

We’re very happy with how the launch worked out for us. Partly thanks to getting in when there were only a few pages of submissions, we’ve got a ton of sweet exposure through Greenlight. At the time of writing, we’ve got 39 540 visitors, 4 909 favorites and 975 comments! That’s pretty insane.

We’ve also seen a really massive influx of Facebook likes, going from 460 to 600 in four days!

We realize this is largely because a lot of you guys have been spreading the word about the game, so a huge thanks goes out to you all for helping us out :)

Despite the number of Greenlight favorites, we’re still “only” at 4 %, but we think there’s no need to worry. Valve has stated that the number of votes isn’t the be all and end all of success, and Secrets of Grindea won’t even be released for a while so it’s not a catastrophe for us if we don’t get 100 % right away.

Regarding the beta, we’re still on said track: one week from now we’ll send out a handful of invites to test “administrative” stuff, like how the invites work, what forum categories we’ll need for the Beta forum, error reporting and so forth. A week after that, we’ll open the gates for the “real” beta testing! It’s been really cool to see the amount of interest and encouragement in the beta thread, and it’s still not too late to post in there if you haven’t. As mentioned in the thread, we’ll choose randomly from everyone who posts there before the beta starts!

So, a lot of time and energy have went into getting things ready for Greenlight and the beta, but we have managed to still get some work done on the game itself! Due to popular demand, we’ve added an experience bar to the HUD (previously it was shown only in the menu), as well as buff indicators.

When a buff is about to run out, it will start pulsating, and eventually become tinted red before disappearing. We might go for a WoW-like cooldown timer approach if testers find this system to be unclear, although the tiny resolution might make that a bit messy. The buffs in the screenshot above are a damage increasing potion, and a spell which increases attack- and cast speed!

We’ve also changed up the notices for when you complete a quest, get a new card and gain an achievement. They used to look very much alike, so we decided to add some flair to each of them:

Sort of how they all used to look

How they’re looking now

In game, they are filled with text and images, of course. Apart from the GUI-work, here’s a brand new two handed weapon you’ll be able to craft!

So yeah, that’s what’s been going on! Back to crunching!

We’re quite overwhelmed (and humbled) by the great reception of the video we posted last week. Most people seemed positively surprised at the combat system currently in place! There’s a couple of other subject we’d love to do spotlights on, so if we can find the time, expect some more videos in the future! :)

Now, let’s talk about the new things we’ve got to show this week. First off, we put the stylist to work! After months of just looking pretty in his booth, you can finally visit him to change your appearance.

You can both change hairstyle, or dye your hair or any of your clothes. Getting a haircut costs money, but changing colors is free!

Both getting a haircut and changing the color of something is a pretty straightforward affair, and you’re able to see the end results by looking at the preview to the right!

Apart from ending Franciscos welfare run, we also added something that’s been a long time coming: achievements! In the game, we call them ”trophies”, because we’re crazy like that.

The basic system probably doesn’t need an explanation, but here it is anyway: it’s a series of challenges geared towards obsessive people like ourselves. Usually though, most games give the player a nice sound, a pop-up and an entry somewhere and call it a day. We wanted to add something extra, and so every achievement comes with some form of reward.

Also, we have plans for some kind of housing system, where some achievements will give you actual trophies or decorations to put on display there! More on that when it actually exists…

Let’s stay true to tradition and finish the recap off with an animation! This time, it’s a new one handed weapon, The Stinger (quite literally)!

Tomorrow we’ll set up a way for you to register for the beta launch!

Stay tuned!

Settling on a difficulty for a game is tough. We’re not making Super Meat Boy, where difficulty is a major selling point, but we don’t want to make the game a casual stroll in the park either.

What we’re going for now is tough for a casual player and challenging for an average player, but probably a tad bit too easy for hardcore gamers.

In order to add some extra mileage for those wanting to push their characters to the limit without putting huge road blocks in front of “normal” players, we added a feature to the arena called Challenges!

At the top level, you can select between Challenges and Versus.

Challenges are just that. Designed trials where your performance will be graded! In multiplayer, you’ll cooperate in these.

Versus is a collection of mini games where you can challenge your friends to a farm-off, the noble art of chicken herding and other wacky mini games! We might cover this in more detail some other time.

In the Challenge menu, you’ll see a list of all unlocked challenges, together with your current best grade (the grades go from ‘C’ to ‘S’). You’ll unlock more challenges as you progress through the story!

Most challenges will be tied to the combat mechanics of the game. For example, you might fight through waves of difficult enemy constellations, or battle a nightmare version of a boss!

When you’ve completed the challenge, you’ll get to see a scoreboard with your grades!

When you return to the arena reception, you’ll receive different items depending on what grade you got. Whenever you beat a challenge on S-rank for the first time, you’ll be rewarded with a unique item!

To move on to a completely different subject, we’re going to do the unthinkable and actually posting some info regarding the beta!

A while back we contacted Steam to see if we could run the beta on their platform. This was just before them announcing Greenlight, and as such, six weeks later we received a template reply telling us to check that service out.

Now, Greenlight seems great. However, it isn’t launching until the end of August (+Valve Time?), and there’s also no way of guessing right now how much Greenlight interest we must garner before being put on Steam, and how happy they are with indies prancing around running betas on there. While our skill at postponing betas is at Olympic level, even we didn’t want to delay it indefinitely!

So, we couldn’t do Steam, but we still wanted some centralized platform with automatic patching and ability to select users to invite. An indie friendly alternative to Steam that does just this is Desura.

Desura is pretty similar to Steam in many ways, and should be a pretty familiar experience for most players used to Valve’s platform. We’ve set up an IndieDB-page for the game in preparation. This is probably also where we’ll open up forums for our beta testers!

The beta isn’t running quite yet, but as you can tell things are moving along! We still have a few things to throw into the mix as far as the game goes. In the coming few weeks, we’ll give you more detailed information on how to register for the beta (we don’t know yet :D ), and shortly after that we’ll be throwing out the invites!

Wow, today’s post became really long… glad you made it to the end! See you next week! :)

This week, we’ll simply distract you with some art while we finish off a couple of more quests for you to enjoy in that legendary beta…! ;3

Fred’s main focus this week has been revisiting our beloved Evergrind City and creating more flavor animations for the people living there.

And Vilya has finally finished remaking the portraits!

We’re celebrating that by starting some new interface work that you’ll hopefully be able to see next time :)

Here’s the death animation for another enemy from our beloved Pumpkin Forest, this time it’s the Scarecrow’s turn to bite the dust.

Besides keeping up with the death animations from last week, Fred took the time to work on the sprite for a new enemy in the game. Aside from being cute and round, this fierce piggy will have the ability to charge the player with incredible force, not even stopping when smashing into the otherwise very useful shield!

Above is a patchwork of the different iterations he went through before we settled on a little more juicy version. The last three are different color variations of the same sprite. Since we already have another brown cuddly creature hanging around in the same area (the Rabby) we figured it would be good to separate them a bit from each other! We might still go with brown and just not have Rabbys and boars in the same zone, though.

Meanwhile, Vilya has been going strong in her portrait factory:

What would a parody on the RPG genre be without some good ol’ fishing?
Not much, if you ask us!

As such, the past week we’ve been adding a little fishing mini game (among other things)!

Checking for a good spot!

You’ll be able to fish from most bodies of water in the game. When you stand on a spot where you can fish, a little emote will pop up above your head, and pressing the action button will make your character enter the mini game. For as long as you’re fishing, monsters won’t try to harm you, so you don’t have to worry about some ninja respawn ruining your day!

Soon…

Click image to view animated gif!

After you’ve thrown your fishing float out, you’ll just have to patiently wait for a bit for a fish to bite. Fish in Grindea is always hungry though, so you’ll probably not have to wait for long!

When a fish does bite, you’ll enter a little mini game that’s inspired by the one in Suikoden II, and sort of reminiscent of the arm wrestling game in The Witcher 2. You’ll control a little bar, that’s attached to a larger bar, and your goal is to keep a randomly moving fish inside it. If the icon leaves your bar, the fish will escape! If you want to see it in action, click on the image above for an animated version!

Yes! A fishie!

You win the battle when the fish reaches the shore. For your hard work, you’re awarded the fish itself! Of course, fishing is also a reliable way to acquiring some solid boots…

The fishing game is part of an effort to give players a reason to stay a while and enjoy the scenery, while also adding even more mileage for the hardcore fans and the completionists. Players won’t have to stay and fish, but for those looking to just chill out a bit after a long day of adventuring, it’s good to know there are other things to do!

This week has been quite busy! It’s only been a few days since the SGA deadline now, for which we finished up and tested the co-op feature like there was no tomorrow. While that was our big focus of the week, we also managed to improve some of the old portraits:

These portraits have actually made quite the journey to get to this point. Here’s a pic showing how they improved since the first version:

Kind of make you wonder how different they will be once the game is done. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last iteration just yet!

Other than that, we also added a couple of animations for the people in Evergrind City, to make the area feel a little more alive:

Now, wish us luck with SGA! Nominees should be announced in the next couple of days :)

This week we spent writing the major cutscenes that will be found in the beginning of the game. These things might change slightly as the game evolves, but should still tell the story properly.

Vilya also created the inside of the headquarters from last week:

Clickety click!

For now there are only three doors, but after the beta we plan on adding special rooms that will unlock as you progress on your adventure and gain rank within The Collectors Guild.

Fred spent the time making some more NPCs, ready to move into the soon bustling city.

We plan on making all our NPCs (save for the guards) special in some way, and in the end most of them should have at least one quest related to them. We’re doing our best to make sure it’s not just a bunch of the traditional “go kill 10 slimes” and try to come up with different types of activities for your character to participate in, but for the beta we might keep it simple to give people a chance to get familiar with the basic systems.

Other than that, we decided to spice up the spell casting graphics a little, adding this effect when releasing a charged spell:

The color will vary slightly depending on what type of spell it is.