Hey guys! Sorry for this extremely late post, I’ve been in the midst of moving and with things still being pretty chaotic around here, I simply forgot to schedule the draft – oops!

Right now our full focus is on the very final boss battle, against Zhamla. While the prototype for the battle is nearing completion, we still feel like something is lacking. Nothing big, just a lil something extra. Our current focus is playing around with tweaking and/or adding bunch of new attacks, patterns and phases to see what feels good and what doesn’t. Overall though, I think it looks absolutely amazing, and can’t wait to show you guys!

We’ll try to record a bunch of videos over the weekend so you can see some of the juicy stuff in action, but for now, here’s a bunch of Fred’s animations:

As for me, I’ve made a new kind of HP-bar as part of the boss battle against Zhamla! This bar is for Braazlet, who you’ll have to defeat before you’re able to do any real damage to Zhamla himself. In the videos we’ve shown before, we’re using placeholder graphics, so it was definitely time for me to add some proper graphics!

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I’ve also made a proper background for the Frosty Fiend portion of Zhamla’s boss battle! As with Braazlet’s HP-bar, we previously used placeholder graphics for this, but now it has its very own proper background:

This week Teddy and Fred made a plan about doing a May crunch, in which they aim to make the Zhamla battle fully playable except for some final polish.

Teddy has since prototyped the transition from Dad’s battle Arena to Zhamla’s (exploded!) battle arena, inserted a healing sequence where the player needs to defeat the bracelet before doing damage to Zhamla himself, and also developed prototypes for the summon phase start and summon phase end.

We’ve also received some of the very last songs that will be added to the game, which definitely feels bittersweet.

Here’s a little sneak peek on some more Zhamla boss animations courtesy of Fred this week:

This week our main focus has been the final cutscenes for the true ending! It’s pretty incredible to finally see the first iterations of the very very very last scenes of the game. There’s still a bunch of polish and animations needed for them to be complete, but the base is all there.

Here’s an early sketch of one of the final scene designs I’ll be making a proper background for as well:

Pretty exciting, huh? Stay tuned! :)

Fred & Teddy continues work on the cutscenes for the endings. The cutscenes inbetween the two major battles involved in the true ending are more or less done. For the bad ending, everything is done up to the “second part”, which is sort of an epilogue where you see what happened after the big battle.

Here’s a little sneak peek WIP from one of the scenes you’ll get to see. What do you think is happening here? :D

Otherwise, here’s a couple animations by Fred from his batch last week:

As for me, I’ve written the first proper draft for about one third of the pages for the production book!

It’s a fine line to make sure the written parts are short and succint while including enough detail to actually keep them interesting. Once all the pages are done, I’ll send it out to the rest of Pixel Ferrets as well as some other trusted readers and we’ll discuss if they should be longer – or even shorter (who knows!). In this draft I’ve leaned into keeping things very short, so I think the main question will be if the information that’s actually in there is interesting enough or not.

Work on the cutscenes continue on this week! Cutscenes are one of those things that take the longest to make, both in terms of programming and animation, and there’s sometimes not a lot to show for all the hours put into making them work – especially when they’re filled with so many end-game spoilers as these are (we are, after all, working on the very last bunch of cutscenes for the game). It’s difficult deciding where to draw the line for how much to show you guys on the blog. On one hand we really value your feedback and want to show you what we’re working on, on the other hand it kind of (literally) spoils certain surprises. Since these are the last bunch of cutscenes and show pretty much how the game ends, we’ve decided to not show much progress from these. Because of this, the blog posts have been pretty short as of late, and I hope you can forgive the lack of juicy art and progress videos. At least this journey is soon coming to an end, and you’ll be able to see all of the cutscenes in their full glory as you actually finish the game! :)

For now, here’s a couple of effects that won’t tell you too much about what’s going on story-wise:

Meanwhile, I can recap what’s been going on with the Visual Novel we started working on ages ago!

I’ve actually finished writing the outline and have let it rest for a while to make sure I catch any problems I didn’t see when first putting it together. The working title for the project is Tales of Grindea and as of now it’s a pretty short visual novel companion piece to Secrets of Grindea which explores the world through the eyes of a collector and a newly created sentient artefact. It’ll have six chapters, of which the first serves as an introduction to the world and characters and the last is the conclusion where your decisions throughout the story decide which ending you get. As I write this, I’m in the progress of writing the actual chapters, so wish me luck on that! :)

This week I’ve continued to focus on the visual aspects of the production book! Even with the general style decided upon there’s still a ton of smaller details to take care of, such as picking fonts and proper colour schemes. While it might seem trivial, it’s in fact extremely important since it determines if the book is comfortably readable and whether it’s visually pleasing at all.

Below you can find a few mockups with some of the fonts we’ve gone through:

Our current favourite is the third. Which one do you prefer? :)

As I’ve been going through more art and game books I’ve also come to the realization that I need to cut more of the original text than I initially thought. I don’t want the production book to drag on with boring details, instead I want the focus to be on the process as a whole with as many pictures as possible and short and succint comments rather than whole chapters. Perhaps I will change my mind again, but for now it seems like an overall better approach for a project like this.

As a result I’m currently going over the text once more with the scissors, trying to polish it down as much as possible!

Fred, meanwhile, has continuined his work on the Frosty Fiend, which now has a proper spawn animation, death animation, roll and soon (!) an alternative attack animation:

Teddy has shifted focus from the boss battle to work on some cutscenes between the two major battles, as well as the cutscenes surrounding one of the endings. This week the both of them will likely team up to finish up those cutscenes, with Teddy requesting animations for the cutscenes whenever he feels he needs one.

A new week, and more Frosty Fiend progress! He has, as of today, one regular attack (he will get another one, but one is enough for now to just test how it feels in-game), then Fred made a “hulk smash” for a potential special attack. It was a bit tricky as the pose was a bit difficult to get right but after much fiddling and reference checking, it worked.

Fred has also made a cannonball dive for him (he was first going to have a regular dive but he soon realized the cannonball felt more appropriate). He thought he would be extra smart here and just use the hulk smash pose straight away and just adjust the arms, but realized quite quickly that he needed to redraw everything for it to look nice. It went smoothly though! Nothing is 100% finished-rendered at this stage, but it’s taken far enough that one can test it in-game and get a fair idea of how it will feel.

Teddy has also continued with Frosty Fiend. He has tinkered together a (nearly finished) test for a snowball attack where the Fiend throws straight ahead instead of lobbing (which is what he has done so far). This way he has equivalents for both the snowball attacks we have previously used back in Seasonne through the snowball-throwing Scroundrel!

As for me, I have gone through more art/game books to get ideas and inspiration for the layout of the production book and made a ton of different design mockups before settling on something like these:

We are still evaluating what type of text design will be the best in terms of balance between readability and aesthetics, so it will probably change a bit before we are completely done:

Which version do you prefer so far?

Hello guys! The weeks rush by and we’re already at the end of January. This week Teddy finally got his screencap softare back up and running on his new setup, so here’s a fresh video featuring a very early prototype of Zhamla’s summoning phase:

None of these graphics are final, nor is the actual pattern. For one, we’re a bit underwhelmed with the cloud’s presence and are currently thinking of ways to spice it up a bit. One such idea is adding a special chain lightning attack to Zhamla’s cloud, an idea that was quickly illustrated by Fred here:

Nothing set in stone just yet though!

Otherwise, the animations continue on – Fred has finished up Zhamla’s base attack animations and done some more work on Frosty Foe:

After having spent a lot of time on the battle against Dad, it’s time to start looking into the final final battle – that against Zhamla. You’ve already met Zhamla once, so you know a little bit about what to expect – it’s gonna be a tough battle ahead!

One of the things we’ve played around with for this encounter is how intense of an inferno will fill the room during the battle. Here’s some of our progress, ranging from almost none to maximum inferno:

In these versions we hadn’t yet adjusted the size or shape of the inferno fire, so we made a version with one better fitting the room as well:

In the end, this is probably pretty close to what we’ll go for. It might be a bit towards the busy side, but on the other hand it is the final battle!

Other than the usual cutscenes and boss programming and animating, Fred has made a bunch of animations for the artefacts you found throughout the game. Here’s one of them:

Stay tuned for more! :)

With the release of the game drawin ever closer, I’ve spent a lot of time this week preparing some PR documents. This means writing things to send out to people who might be interested in playing and/or reviewing the game once it’s released. It’s one of the less exciting parts of game development to be sure, but someone needs to do it and as we’re not working with any publisher, that falls on me!

Now, while we currently won’t work with any publisher for the PC version, we would consider getting some help with bringing the game to consoles and the foreign markets. We’d absolutely love to get Secrets of Grindea to as many platforms and regions as possible but realize we won’t be able to do all of that by ourselves. Anyway, decisions like that remain on the backburner while we finish up the last of the game, so we’ll have to wait to make any firm decisions!

Speaking of finishing the game, Teddy and Fred continues their work with the final bosses! Here’s a current prototype of the Dad Battle:

And here’s a bunch of related animations by Fred:

As for the Visual Novel, I just want to say thank you to everyone who voted in the polls! I’ve taken a look at the votes and a summary can be seen over here. Now I need to get some writing going! :)