Used to Monday updates yet?! You better be, ’cause here’s another!

For Vilya, this week started off with the return to Pillar Mountains (one of the first areas of the game). We decided that we wanted the mountains to look a little different from the ground levels, so she made new trees (birches!) and huge rocks to fill out the open areas (just like the bushes from the previous post do on the ground level).

Here is a screen of the result:

After this it was time to return to one of our (least) favorite subjects: Menu systems! Because it’s almost time for the first people to try the game out, we thought cleaning up and actually creating a main menu would be a good idea.

This is what it looks like at the moment:

The clouds pass by in the background, and in the future (when Fred has some space in his schedule) we plan on adding birds flying by as well. As for now, only the main screen and character select sections are in place, so our work on this continues this week with character creation, multiplayer hosting and the like!

Freds major task this week has been working out sprites and animations for our multiplayer death/resurrect system. The main focus was on this little ghost fellow, which is what you turn into if you die during a co-op session.

Once you die you can move around freely and while you can’t engage in combat, you can use some sweet ghost exclusive emotes and flavour animations to cheer on your surviving pals! It’s up to them to resurrect you, which can be somewhat hectic if you’re in the middle of an epic boss fight. If all players die and turns into ghosts, it’s game over and you will have to restart from the latest check point!

On a closing note, we’ve submitted the game to the Swedish Game Awards, which is a nation wide student competition here in Sweden. Wish us luck!

Next Week: Menus, menus, skills and more menus!

Hello again and welcome to another weekly recap!

But wait, you say, it’s not Friday today… No, indeed, here in Sweden it’s currently Monday evening, and as we already mentioned over at Facebook and Google+ last week (sadly, we forgot about Twitter..), we are rescheduling our future updates to Mondays from now on.

The reason is simply that we have changed our workflow and made stricter schedules for each of us, listing the tasks we need to do each week. Since we all enjoy working on the game during the weekends we also thought Mondays would be a better time to show the progress. That way we can show the tasks we finished during our scheduled week, including the things we saved for the weekend!

Anyway, let’s forget about that now and focus on what’s important: the update!

This week, Vilya spent making another zone, the east outskirts of the city. There’s a mysterious pond, a river and a house you won’t reach just yet.. ;3

To make the environment look better, and to avoid people getting hidden behind trees too often, we decided to create bushes to scatter around the areas. These will replace most of the random trees standing in the middle of any area so you won’t get caught by a naughty enemy hiding behind them.

Fred has been really busy this week. So busy, that he managed to complete all the tasks for next week, this week! Wooho!
Walk animations for a bunch of different NPCs was one of the tasks this week, so here’s a few of them in action paired together with some updated portraits by Vilya!

Writing and reading dialogues in XML-format was becoming quite impractical, especially for the artists. When the implementation workload let up a bit, Teddy whipped up a simple tool that made the process much less painful! The tool is made in good old C#/Winforms.

Next week: Being dead and waiting for revival in a multiplayer game is no fun. We’ll look into ways of making death (or being dead) a bit less boring!

This week we have continued to refine and change small parts of the city. There’s always things to change for the better, so it’s quite easy to keep busy that way..

One of the many touch ups Vilya has been working with this week is giving the old dirt roads a face lift! Shout out to the guys over at the TIGsource forums for their great feedback and keeping us motivated!

Anyway, we continue on, this time showing you another screen (an animated one on top of that!) of another part of Evergrind City:

(Click the image to watch it in full size and animated!)

Fred keeps filling the city with NPCs and animations, to help Evergrind come to life! Some of the stuff he did this week can be seen in the screenshot above.

There’s still a ton of NPCs and other animations to go before Evergrind is even close to finished, so stay for more of the same the coming weeks!

Also, as promised, below is the song that’s playing in Evergrind City! It’s written by Andrew Riley of Luckylionstudios.com, who’s composing the entire soundtrack for us!

[audio:https://www.secretsofgrindea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Andrew-Riley-Secrets-of-Grindea-OST-Evergrind-City.mp3|titles=Andrew Riley – Secrets of Grindea OST – Evergrind City]

Author’s comment: “I wanted to write an upbeat, fun song, with a certain sentimentality that would come with spending time in the city with your friends. I hope you enjoy it and thanks for listening!“

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Formed by pixly gods
Brought to life through wizard’s writ
Art of crafting games”

[Teddy has mostly been busy with his favourite part of the job: implementing the tidal wave of stuff created by the artists!]

Next week: We venture indoors in Evergrind and we take a shot at spicing up the combat!

We’re back! The holidays were great and we all got some time together with our friends and family, but we also managed to squeeze in some work. Here’s what we’ve been doing lately:

Vilya has been putting together the major city of the game: Evergrind City. The outside areas are almost completely done and the only thing missing is creating what will be inside the houses. Quite some work, of course, but we’re well under way! Here’s a screen from the city, more to come next week:

Fred has had his hands busy with three things: skills, NPCs, and being sick once again.

Here’s the Ice Nova skill in action. Close ranged AoE at its best! The added chance to freeze your enemies is a pretty sweet bonus.

And here we have one of the many NPCs living in Evergrind. The Blacksmith! Besides having one of the finest beards in all of Grindea, this fellow will help the players along their quest by forging some of the sweetest gear you can get your hands on!

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Skills to pay the bills
Sharpened blades and crippling cold
Winter is coming”

[In the programming department, most time has been spent on getting Fred’s skill animations into the game and working, as well as making them look as good as possible!]

Next week: More Evergrind goodness, plus a special treat for your ears!

Another week, another update! We’re now halfway through December and everyone is counting the days left before christmas. Here at the Secrets of Grindea office we keep pressing on while dreaming of the traditional swedish christmas cuisine.. :3

This week Vilya made even more portraits! She also revised some of them, and revisions will keep being made throught the entire production. Here’s an example of changes being made on the go, as well as a few of the new faces:

Better? We think so!

She also started making a few props that will appear inside one of the buildings in town. A few weapon stands, for example:

Besides adding some new stuff to the super secret first boss, Fred has been swinging away at some new skills and NPC sprites!

This here is one of the early skills from the one handed weapons skill tree (we have 8 trees in total). We haven’t got a proper name for it yet, but it plunges the hero forward damaging anything in it’s path. Range and damage increases by leveling it up.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Treasures, puzzles, fight!
Only the best are chosen.
Are you strong enough?”

[Teddy has mostly been laying the foundations for the spectacular trials! For the puzzle part, a few more puzzles were created to ease new players into it!]

Next Week: Merry Christmas!

This week Vilya spent doing no less than 29 portraits for different NPCs! Some of them you’ll see below – who do you think they are?

She also made these market stands where you’ll be able to get a variety of special items! The character sprites were made by Fred afterwards – can you pair them up with the correct face above?

Fred has been battling a vicious cold and has been out of action for a big chunk of the week :C

Besides doing the market NPCs above, he has been able to squeeze in most of the animations needed for our treasure system! We’ll post a video about it once we got it all set up, in the mean time you will have to settle for some animations off the main character digging up some treasure.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Sounds of moving earth.
Ancient ink will guide your steps.
Let the hunt begin!”

[A basic sound system is in place, as well as a system for finding maps which leads to buried treasures to use that slick digging animation on!]

Next Week: The portraits start getting matching NPC-sprites and Vilya visits her parents! Teddy takes on the trial of setting up the trials!