This week we have spent a lot of time on interface stuff, mainly the skill distribution interface and the shop screen! As they’re not fully implemented you’ll have to wait a bit longer to see how it works, but we promise a video of it in it’s full glory(?) once we’re done!

To move on to more interesting things, Vilya has spent some time of the week doing this abandoned temple that will be a main dungeon in the game!


Click it!

Unfortunately we won’t show any more than the entrance for a while, as we still need to backtrack to get the beta ready & polished, but to make up for it we have a few animations from Fred:

This is a powered up version of the move you saw last week: Blade Flurry. By holding the button for longer, you get that high damaging final strike.

And here’s the equivalent for the two handed overhead attack. If you just press the skill button, you’ll just get one hit off, but if you hold it, you’ll get an additional slash during the startup. This will both yield more damage, and make it easier to land.

This week, there’s been a ton of skill work done, and of course the thousand year battle of the GUI rages on. Menus aren’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world to show, and they aren’t even fully implemented yet, so this week we’ll treat you with two animated screencap gifs of the new skills!

Click it!

This here spell is our first summon spell! It will summon a lightning cloud which hovers around, doubling as damage dealer and moral support (dat smile)! This is the first level of the skill. Later levels include features like targeting flying enemies, more damage, faster attack speed and less glee.

While it’s not set in stone, we’re toying with the thought of having summons be permanent (until you dismiss them). Instead of costing mana as you cast them, they would “block out” a part of your mana bar. That is, if you summon something which costs 30 % of your mana, for as long as you have that summon in play, those 30 % will not regenerate!

Click this too!

The gif above showcases one of our one handed weapon skills: Blade Flurry*!

It’s basically a series of very fast hitting strikes right in front of the character. It’s superb for exploiting openings in duels, like versus this lone Halloweed. It also has a very quick charge speed to offset its limited area of effect. The speed and duration of the move changes as you charge it, and later levels will have a fierce finishing strike to add even more damage!

For those of you yearning for another video… stay tuned! Some day, when the planets are aligned, it’ll appear!

*Working name :D

This week we have worked on many different areas of the game! We’re currently trying to tie everything together for our long-awaited beta (sorry about that!), so chances are the coming updates will keep on being little bit all over the place.

What we can show you from the skill area are these two skills, animated by Fred:

(Click for larger version!)

This is the Earth Spike spell! This is part of an experiment we’re having with targeted spells.

As you charge the spell, you will gain control of a small target circle, and when you release the button the spell will be cast at that location. The circle has a limited range, and cannot pass through walls (although it can pass through small obstacles like trees or rocks).

We wanted to at least try it out, since we felt a new type of spell casting would be awesome for the game’s variety. It actually works pretty well! The challenge comes with trying to balance out the high accuracy.

The new charging system is also shown in the gif! Being a ranged spell with high mobility, the charge time of Earth Spike is pretty high. Level 1 and 2 looks the same, but level 2 will knock enemies up and stun them, opening them up for attack or giving the player time to reposition. Level 3 upgrades all aspects, with more damage, larger area of effect and longer stun. Notice how the rabbit is easily comboed with the mace due to the knockup and stun! Be careful, though, because heavy enemies can’t be knocked up.

This second spell is a typical Speed Up spell, which will increase your attack- and cast speed for a limited time. Great for when you’re in a hurry!

Other than spells we also worked on a feature that I don’t think has been mentioned yet: Cards!

Every enemy you kill will have a low chance of dropping a card like the one above. These cards will each give you a slight passive boost, which means collecting them all would improve your character by quite a bit!

They will also feature a portrait of the enemy that dropped it (pictured above is, as you might have guessed, the Green Slime Card) and will be viewable from the Card Album menu at any time.

Lastly, we have some fresh new portraits added this week:

Not much to say there. :) See you next week!

We all like flashy things, and there is no better way to start off a fancy boss fight than with a fancy introduction! This week, one of the things we’ve worked on is this flash screen, which will introduce your enemy every time shit is about to hit the fan:

As you can see (if you remember our old post) we have reworked the look of this scary boss! This also includes new portraits:

We’ve also been messing around with the idea of changing up how skills work, and after some time in the design dungeon, we’ve decided to give it a shot.

Most skills will now be able to be charged into flashier and more powerful versions by holding down the button. The charge time differs between spells depending on how limiting this extra delay would be for its usability, as well as how powerful the upgrades are. Our main reason for this change is to give players greater variety and involvement in the combat.

Initially, only two charge levels are available, but as you add points in a skill you unlock more charge tiers. Most offensive skills will have five of them!

Below are the animations and effects for the fireball charge, as well as the projectile sprite for level 1-2, 3 and 4:

The fifth level is not yet done, but we promise to crank the fanciness up to max for all top level spells!

Next week: More spells, portraits and… cards!

While much of last week was spent working on the project report for school, we’ve still managed to squeeze out some more stuff for the game! The inside of Evergrind City is continuing to take shape. Here’s a couple of the buildings Vilya furnished last week:

Above is the Hat Store! Here, you’ll be able to purchase and craft some sweet, sweet headgear! Headgear which you can show off to people online in order to impress friends, seduce the man or woman of your dreams, or to nail that job interview!

The slightly messy abode of a slightly messed up Alchemist! He might be crazy, but he’s a good guy. Not to mention he’ll be your go-to guy for stuff like potions!

Fred on the other hand have had a hard time leaving the Halloween Forest without a proper goodbye, so he stuck around for another week. Besides finishing up the last reaming bits of the Halloweed, he also did a cute little death animation for the Jumpkin!

Next Week: Reworking how the skills work and look, some more buildings, and… GUI :(

This week, we’re taking shelter from the spooky forest inside some buildings! Vilya has been busy creating the cozy, candy filled house of the witch, as well as a substantially less picturesque abandoned house…

Click on the screens for enlarged versions!

Fred has mainly been busy with cleaning up all of the basic attack animations for all of the enemies. Here’s a sample of this week’s workload in form of everyone’s favorite flying pumpkin wizard, the Jack O’ Lantern:

We’ve also been working on getting some lighting going to boost the atmosphere in the forest, and after some sweet feedback from Reddit, this is what it looks like at the moment (click it!):

If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to make a noise in the comments! :)

Next Week: Hurr durr ‘loween

Not much to say about this week’s post, except that we’re still working on the Halloween Forest! This week, Vilya has been working on some sweet set pieces, while Fred soldiers on with the many animations. Without further ado, let’s dive right into the pixels!

This here is the house of a candy cooking witch! Somewhere down the line, she must’ve realized candy was better for business than potions. Don’t eat her walls though; she won’t like that…

Here’s an old shrine in a small graveyard, tied to the ancient religion of the world.

On the animation side of things the scarecrow has sprung to life, ready to cause trouble for any collectors traveling through the Halloween Forest!

Next Week: You couldn’t guess: more halloween stuff!

As promised, we’ve been crunching away with the Halloween Forest this week! We’ve got the basic color scheme and props down, as well as nearly all of the enemies that will inhabit the region.

Apart from this screen, we’ve iterated the whole forest layout to something we feel pretty confident will work out, so what’s left now props wise is mostly bigger set pieces, like the witch’s cottage, and putting everything together in a nice way!

 

Here’s the enemy lineup Fred’s been working on

And below are idle animations for a couple of them!

  • The pumpkin will be a cannonfodder-type enemy, which means there will be quite a lot of them, and they are pretty straightforward to defeat (but certainly more deadly than slimes and rabbits)
  • The flying jack o’ lantern is a ranged type, and fires small projectiles at the players. He also scales with the number of players, shooting more projectiles if there are many players. His flames can be blocked with a shield, or even reflected if timed properly!
  • The scarecrow is a tanky, melee type that can withstand several hits before going into hitstun. Using the shield to find openings is a dominant strategy here.
  • Finally, the ghost is a harass type enemy, which stays invisible until it is in position for an attack. It appears as it charges, so you have some time to react, but will fade away again soon after the attack is finished. You’ll want to dispose of these buggers as soon as you see them! They are trickster ghosts of sorts, waiting around for unwary travelers to play with.

We’ll also be adding a plant enemy called Halloweed, which is an upgraded version of the flower you might’ve spotted in our videos. We’re still trying to nail his color scheme though, hence his absense in the lineup! He’ll use his vines to whack players that are close to him, but unlike his less agile brother, this guy will burrow and chase you underground if you’re out of his reach for too long!

Encountering all of these enemies all at once would certainly be a daunting (and frustrating) challenge, so we’ll spread them out a bit and try to make sure the spawn compositions are varied and well balanced!

Next Week: Even more halloween stuff will see the light!

Due to an unexpected turn of events, we’ve done some redecorating in our schedule. We’ve got a golden opportunity of merging working on Grindea with schoolwork, and we felt we had to take it! The flip side was that, since it’s a project course, we needed a somewhat isolated element of the game that would take about five weeks to complete.

We’ve chosen to create a new field in the game, and as such, the stuff we had planned to do will be frozen until this course is done. It’s mostly good news, since we’ll get more done, and all of us sort of secretly wanted to work on new environments and enemies. The updates will probably be more interesting as well, for that matter! However, due to this arrangement, we’ll postpone the beta testing as well. :(

To get our minds of that dark lining of the silver cloud, here are three very anatomically correct ferrets on top of each other!

This is our logo! We’ll have to throw together some nice font that says “Pixel Ferrets” too, but this is the core! We felt it was about time to get one, being nine months into development and all.

Now back to our plans for the coming weeks:

The area we’re going to create is temporarily called the Halloween Forest, but we plan on changing the name to something a bit more fun later on! The zone is somewhat scary (as you probably figured out from the name) yet still cute. The enemies and decorations will include things such as pumpkins, lanterns, candle lights, scarecrows, ghosts, mist and spooky trees. This is the home of the odd Candy Witch, a couple of wicked twins and a mysterious hooded man. It’s also here you will have the chance of helping a lonely scarecrow in a quest!

This is one of our favourite areas (at least to talk about) so we’re looking forward to a few entertaining weeks for all of us. We hope you’ll will like it as much as we do!

In-between all the planning of our new schedules and preparation for the new course, Fred has kick started operation Halloween Forest with its very first inhabitant, a little jumpin’ pumpkin!

There’s plenty more enemies to come during the following weeks; we have a total of five planned for this area.

Next Week: Enemies! Trees! Stuff! Halloween!

Another week has rushed past, and the battle with the GUI continues! We’re pretty much wrapping up the main menu, and are moving on to in-game stuff. Due to our passionate and undying love for interface work, we also decided to redesign how keyboard vs. controller works in the game.

But let’s get the main menu out of the way, first!

Click image to enlarge!

This here is the multiplayer lobby! Players can gather there before starting a game, and adjust a couple of multiplayer settings. Of course, if you don’t like waiting for that dude who’s just gonna “grab a sandwich or something”, you can start the game and have your friends connect to you while you’re playing!

The first option you have is Item Share. It can be set to either Each Take, where all items go to whatever player that picks them up, or Round Robin, which distributes items fairly and randomly.

Secondly we have Mentorship, which if turned on will synchronize the combat efficiency of all characters to roughly the same level as the lowest leveled character. This is useful for players who want to play together, but haven’t gotten equally far into the game. Instead of having to start over from the beginning, they can play from where the lower leveled player is in the story without the higher leveled one wreaking havoc and potentially ruin the experience for his friend.

That sums up the lobby pretty well, so let’s head on to the HUD-changes by showing two screens of the different setups:

Gamepad HUD

Keyboard HUD

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally decided to completely separate the control schemes for keyboard and gamepads. Up until now, we’ve had emulator-like controls on the keyboard, which worked sort of well, but certainly not as well as it could. This meet-halway-there approach limited our options with the controller as well, so this was the right thing to do.

The new keyboard HUD looks and works similar to modern RPGs and MMOs, where you have a bar with abilities which you activate with hotkeys (which you can bind however you want — in the picture I’ve used keys close to those I use for the sword and shield). You can have up to ten quickslots set at a time, and a quickslot can contain either a skill, a consumable item or a weapon.

The gamepad HUD looks like it used to, and also has ten quickslots. The first two can be used by just pressing a button, and two sets of four more quickslots can be accessed by holding the left or the right trigger before pressing the button. We might do a video of this later to show it in action.

Luckily, it’s not all GUIs in ferretland. Fred has spent some time making a few cool, new weapons for players to use!

Next Week: Even moar GUI-work! Woohoo! Fred will be making the rest of the animations for our new weapons