The multiplayer implementation of the Arcade Mode is almost complete, and we’ve had a long, sweaty testing session in the “office” today! We could’ve streamed it over at Fred’s Twitch channel, but we didn’t think of that until we were nearly finished. However, we’ll probably test it some more in the coming days and we’ll try to remember to stream it then so everyone can watch us fail miserably at our own game! :D

On the subject of streams, Fred has begun streaming on his previously mentioned channel again! Since he might be streaming pretty often, we won’t be posting the link on Facebook each time,  so we recommend anyone interested in watching him do animation work to follow him on Twitch or us over on Twitter.

Anyway, back to Arcade Mode. As always, we’re making an effort to make multiplayer as interesting as the single player experience. The monster scaling carries over automatically from the Story Mode, but we’re also modifying encounters and room sizes to better accommodate the number of players in the game.

To avoid having players becoming more powerful as an effect of the increased enemy count, the drop rates are adjusted to make it comparable to how much money and loot a single player would’ve received. Speaking of loot, a huge difference in the Arcade Mode compared to the Story Mode is that clients receive their own loot, kind of like how it is in Diablo 3. This is to avoid having a single player accidentally (or intentionally) take all the good loot, and it also leads to a lot greater diversity in how players build!

The resurrection system is also altered, disabling in-combat resurrection completely. Instead, any players that die will automatically revive with 1 HP when a room is cleared! This might seem harsh, but since health is the most valuable resource in the Arcade Mode, having regular resurrection would be very powerful as it constitutes a form of healing.

To round things off, here’s an animation from an upcoming skill with the hugely creative work name “Berserker Mode“!

Happy new year guys!

We hope you’ve all had a great Christmas as well as a good start to the new year! The three of us took some needed time off and spent some quality time with friends and family, absorbing energy to make this year as productive as we possibly can. Hopefully all the amazing support you’ve given us during last year will carry over to 2014!

Since we pretty much just landed from the holidays we don’t have much too show this week, but we’ve managed to scramble together something!

We’re doing our best to give each area in the Arcade Mode its own unique challenges, and the Flying Fortress is no different! These little trinkets will take the torch from thorns and beehives at making adventurers’ lives miserable.

The yellow crystal will continuously spawn new random enemies until it’s destroyed, while the red flying thingamajig is part of a bullet hell challenge (a recurring theme during the dungeon in Story Mode)!

Meanwhile in code land… Arcade Mode multiplayer takes its first steps!

Hey all!

This week, we’ve added a couple of new floors to the Arcade Mode, based on the Flying Fortress. This has opened up some interesting enemy combinations, as well as challenges (such as perfect guard training and bullet hell dodging). Here’s a screen of an outside room on the 7th floor:

Apart from that, we’re also trying out an updated way of showing damage numbers. We’ve gotten feedback from many testers that say it’s sometimes a bit difficult to see if you take damage during chaotic fighting because the damage numbers look the same regardless if they come from an enemy or a player.

To mitigate this, we’ve made the color of enemy damage white, and kept the player damage red. Since shield damage used to be gray, we’ve changed those to blue! It’s a bit weird at first when you’re used to the old system, but after a while it feels okay again :P

Fred has been getting into the holiday mood by continuing to animate the frosty friend! Below is a charged up version of the summon. Not as cute, but packs more of a punch!

Howdy neighbor!

Hey guys! First of all, thanks a lot for your feedback in last week’s post. Most of you seem to prefer these weekly updates, so we’ll keep going at them! :3

This week we have been working on a bunch of different things. To begin with, we implemented a high score system for the Arcade Mode. The high score is now available both from the main menu and in the starting town of the Arcade Mode through a bulletin board. The main menu version features your best 10 runs, while the bulletin board focuses on your top 3, as can be seen below:

Apart from recording the name of your character and the score you got, you’ll also be able to see what floor you reached, and how gorgeous your character looked at the time of his or hers untimely demise!

As you may or may not notice, a couple of fonts have changed as well. This is because we’ve been working on an automated system for text embellishment, which enables the game to create fancy looking text at runtime. This will make things a lot easier for those of you who were interested in making translations with the translation tool we built some time back, as you won’t have to make custom graphics!

While Teddy and Vilya have been busy with making Arcade Mode ready for beta testing, Fred has kept working on those cave enemies from last time. This time he brings us the bug walk and idle, as well as some movement for that wormy creature:

Also, this is our 100th weekly recap! Wohoo! Time to celebrate with more work :)

This week has been all about progress, in more than one way. Not only are we progressing with the game in general, we’ve also been focusing on how you progression in the Roguelike-mode (now officially named Arcade Mode) will affect your character and the town of Arcadia.

We mentioned unlockable town improvements in a previous post, and now we’ve actually put some of them into the game:

Click the image for some animated GIF acion!

Our goal is to make you feel like you’re accomplishing more than just another high score for yourself: you’re actually helping the town expand, and in doing so also unlock new quests and perks for yourself.

Most of these improvements are unlocked simply by playing the arcade mode. When you die, your current score will add itself to a total score which represents all of your game runs combined, and once that hits certain levels you’ll unlock a variety of rewards, including town upgrades:

Every town needs a Mayor, and Arcadia is no different! Just like the town, he evolves the more points you manage to score while playing in Arcade mode.

Now it’s time to pack our bags, as we’re set to go represent the game over at Gamex in just a few days! Teddy and Vilya will be there for the entire event, so please drop by to try the game, chat or complain about the nonexistant release date anytime between Thursday and Sunday (check opening hours at the site).

To find us, look for Uppsala University’s GAME booth, where we’ll be hanging out with some of our old classmates who are also bringing their game projects :)

While there were certainly a bunch of you who liked having HD portraits, the majority seemed to prefer the portraits matching the native in-game resolution. We wanted to keep the new look, though, so Vilya made a down scaled version, which can be seen below. We’re quite happy with how it turned out!

Some of you were concerned about the portrait and sprite not matching each other. Don’t fret! This blonde young guy isn’t your father, but a fellow collector :)

Here’s a little teaser gif from when you beat a floor in the Roguelike! Your performance is graded, and you’re given a large score bonus based on how well you played, and how many rooms you braved. This is for the first floor, which explains the relatively few rooms.

The quest for the flavor animations is an ongoing and seemingly endless task, but Fred keeps hammering away at it. The Collector’s HQ has been the main focus this week as well, but some of the local Evergrind residents have also been given some love.

During the past week, the Roguelike Mode has continued to get some development love, and we’re out for some feedback once again! We’ve been discussing and implementing persistency of the Roguelike, and come up with a little town called Arcadia.

Small beginnings!

The idea behind Arcadia is to give an anchor point between your runs. In the screenshot is a basic version of the town, but as you progress through the mode you’ll unlock town improvements, both functional and purely cosmetical. Let’s break the major features down:

Essence of Grindea

Essence is a roguelike only currency used within Arcadia. You’ll find it as rare drops from monsters and bosses, as well as rewards for quests, accomplishments and at the end of runs. Needless to say, all essence collected will go into a pool that’s not limited to a single character!

Perks

Perks are tiny advantages you can unlock and equip to boost your chances. While we’re planning to add quite a bunch of these, you can only have three equipped at one time! Examples of perks are starting items, a small sum of money, a skill point, slightly better drop rates, and so forth. In the screenshot, I’ve equipped a perk letting me start with a Squire’s Sword instead of the Wooden Sword, giving me a slight early game edge!

Quests and Achievements

Quests work a bit differently from the regular game. You can only have one quest active at a time, but you can change and remove the active quest whenever you want. While a quest is active, the roguelike mode is changed in some way. For example, if a quest NPC asks you to “defeat the Pumpking in Pumpkin Woods”, a Pumpking (it doesn’t really exist – yet) will spawn as a boss or a challenge. Perhaps a quest is a challenge to reach a certain floor with no healing whatsoever, disabling healing in runs as long as the quest is active! Quests will never make a run easier, so you can’t use them to unfairly boost your score.

Achievements also exist in the story mode, but as with quests they work a bit differently. While they are character based there, in the roguelike mode they carry over between runs and give rewards relevant to the roguelike. An achievement might be to reach certain floors without taking damage, beating high score thresholds, or completing difficult challenges.

Transferable Items

Transferable Items are things you unlock which can then be redeemed by your characters in story mode! This will probably mainly feature cosmetic items — especially viable with the new style slots — but we could technically also have genuinely powerful equipment transfers with level restrictions.

Please let us know what you think, and don’t hesitate to share your ideas!

No weekly recap is complete without some moving graphics from Fred, so to tie the topic together, here’s a new level up effect for when a player… yeah.

PS: We made the Slime Hammer wobble <3

Since the Dad character got an all new look last week, Fred took the time to put together a brand new sprite to go with it!

Besides reworking some other older animations in need of touch ups, Fred also went ahead and made graphics for some trap-like hazards we’re adding to the game.

The roots will act as a blockade that players either have to destroy or move around. The spiked version will deal damage if walked into, and the beehive will rapidly spawn Bees until the hive itself is destroyed.

Since your reaction to the rogue-like mode/endless dungeon was so positive, we’ve also put together a little prototype of such a mode to measure the potential. Here’s a screenshot of how it currently looks:

Click to view in full size!

We’ve decided to make it a room-to-room affair, much how it works in The Binding of Isaac, partly for productivity reasons. Basically, each room presents the player with a challenge (usually battling a group of monsters). The drop rates have been adjusted so that interesting items drop more often, and every enemy also have a small chance to drop a random piece of equipment suited to the floor.

In the screenshot, you can also see the thorns showcased earlier in the post. Traps and obstacles are used to avoid having most rooms looking exactly the same.

Another source of variation visible in the screenshot is elite mobs, based on a suggestion by JayneM over at the beta forums. It’s a more streamlined version of the microbosses we talked about a few weeks back. Every monster has a small chance of spawning as an elite enemy, giving them changes to their stats and behavior. The bee (pink aura) in the screenshot moves faster, has more HP and a much shorter wind-up time for its dive attack. The elite version of the Green Slime will leave trails of extremely slowing goo behind when it moves, making the encounter more challenging the longer you leave it alive.

Apart from being significantly stronger, elite mobs have really high drop rates on all their items and gold, while also granting more exp if killed.

Other stuff we’re also considering adding are different types of shops, semi-random puzzles with time limits, challenge rooms, performance based scoring, etc.

If you have any more suggestions for us, don’t hesitate to drop a comment!

This week, the yeti marks the end of enemy design with a slam, and we’ve also made a quick redesign of the main character’s dad:

Apart from asset creation, we’ve also brainstormed quite a bit regarding replayability. The endgame content of Grindea has always been an important part for us, and we want players to have a ton of stuff to strive for after the main story has been completed. One of our endgame features has been something we call Endless Tower, in which players will fight through an seemingly endless amount of rooms filled with different enemy composition. The difficulty increases by each passing room, as does the rewards for completing them.

While discussing this feature, we realized in how many ways this was similar to a classic rogue-like, and began exploring how the idea might be turned into a separate game mode. Players would need to fight through floors consisting of a number of different rooms, each room being filled with enemies, traps, puzzles or other tasks for the players to complete. The floor layouts would be randomly generated each play through, making every session unique.

This mode would also feature permadeath, meaning if you die once your character will be gone forever. You will start every play through with a new level 1 character, so you won’t have to worry about killing of your regular, uber-farmed characters. Since this mode is meant to be played during short sessions we will adjust a lot of the droprates to better fit the fast paced action. Gear and cards will drop a lot more frequently, while the health orbs might be more rare!

There are many good reasons to add this mode. Since we already have the Endless Tower planned and we’ll use the same enemies and environments as the fully hand crafted story mode, adding it will require very little development time while providing a huge boost to the replayability. If we ever decide to open the game up for pre order early-access, it would also be a good way to give early adopters something to entertain themselves with between patches.

If any of you rogue-like fans out there have any additional ideas, feel free to let us know through the comments! We’re always interested in hearing your feedback :)