One of our game’s big selling points have been a lively atmosphere made possible through tons of flavor animations. In that spirit, the snowlands have been coming to life with some new NPC animations over the past week!

Santa isn’t quite santa unless he’s laughing

Scotty is shoveling an impressive amount of snow outside of his cabin

You can make the world come alive with other things than just NPCs!
Squirrels, for example

Apart from this, Fred also recorded a short video explaining the role of Puzzle Skills in Secrets of Grindea!

This week, aside from more Winterland animations, Fred has been working on some more equipment! The game had a shortage of shields in particular, so we set out on a quest to rectify that.

Here’s a little video that shows the process of creating a new weapon and a shield:

Apart from the Iron Shield shown in that video, there’s also the Barrel Shield, the Energy Shield and the Crystal Shield:

We’re doing our best to add secondary stats and special effect on equipment of similar tier.

Secondary stats means that even if an armor piece usually raises DEF, and a weapon usually raises ATK, that’s not all they could do. Perhaps the armor is a wizard’s robe raising INT, or maybe it’s cursed and will raise ATK while actually lowering DEF? Conversely, perhaps you could fight with a wrench, which has weaker ATK than a same tier sword, but raises DEF or the recovery speed of your shield.

Special effects on equipment are a bit more advanced than regular stats. For example, the Energy Shield will power up projectiles you bounce back with Perfect Guard, making them deal 50 % more damage. The Crystal Shield has about half the HP of the other shields, but the Perfect Guard damage reduction is 85 % instead of 50 %, making it much more durable if you trust your ability to perfect guard consistently.

The goal is that We don’t want every equipment swap to be based on a quick glance, but to have players select gear suiting their play style.

To end this post we have a little something from Vilya as well: a couple of skill icons!

Some are new, some have been improved. Which has been the overall theme for her work these weeks – making small changes here and there, especially around the dungeon. Next up for her, however, is continuing the cave area we showed a few weeks back, so stay tuned for that!

This week, we’ve finally started working at full speed on the first temple! We’ve got a ton of stuff down, most notably in the enemy department. Three new enemies have been prototyped, and we’re mostly done with the fourth and final normal temple enemy. After that, we’ll start designing the layout of the temple itself!

Here’s a screenshot with the three enemies we’ve made so far:

The enemies in the screenshot are the following:

Pecko (the bird)

The Pecko is a giant bird that has made the temple grounds its home, and is quite merciless when it comes to defending its territory! It’s a tanky, quite mobile enemy with a large attack range thanks to its ability to stretch its neck.

Wisp (the ball)

The Wisp is a small, fast harass unit that fires homing projectiles at players. Trying to fight tougher enemies with Wisp projectiles chasing makes any fight twice as tough, so you’ll want to hunt these things down quickly.

Guardian (the crystal)

The Guardian is a support enemy, which disrupts the battlefield in the enemy’s favor. They can switch between three modes:

Green crystals fire deadly beams between each other, cutting off areas and limiting player maneuverability, purple crystals create gravity fields which slow players down and blue crystals shield other enemy units (except other blue crystals), making them immune to damage until the shield wears off or the blue crystal is destroyed.

To be as effective as possible while crunching out these enemies, Fred made a pilgrimage to Visby and has been crashing at Teddy’s place for the past week! They filmed some of their exploits with Teddy’s crappy mobile camera. As a boon to you guys, we’ve used the clips to create a short “documentary” of the week:

Hello and happy valentines day to everyone (one day early, but hey)!
Sadly(?), today’s update does not have a lot to do with romance. Instead, we focus on character creation, since it has been our main focus this week!

The week started off with Vilya creating and later adjusting haircuts together with Fred. A few mishaps later they ended up spending almost three entire days (not even kidding) adjusting clothing colors. Imagine how tired they are of that by now!

In the end everything turned our quite well though! We currently have 30 different clothing colors (per item) to pick from and 8 different haircuts per gender. There will be more as we move on though, so fear not! Hopefully you will all have a favorite style before we’re done with the game ;3

Anyway, there really isn’t much more to say. Instead, have a look at this video with commentary by Fred, which shows everything you need to know about the character creation:

Other than that, a lot of you guys asked us about the beta last week and how to get into it. Because we wanna start off small, we’ll begin with inviting people we know and have worked with previously. After that, we’ll expand more and include people from outside our circles. When the time is near we’ll let you know of a way to sign up, don’t worry!

Next week: We remake the GUI for keyboard users and add more skills!

Another week rushes by!

This week we (especially Fred) spent a lot of time spicing up the combat by adding new and improved effects to just about everything! To show you what it looks like, we prepared a video with commentary from our animator himself, Fred:

In the meanwhile, Vilya has spent her days reworking the dirt tiles from last week, fiddling around with the background layers of our mountain area – people requested blur, and we’ll try it out!

She has also been improving on the portraits a bit more, and yet another sneak peek is available here (click to view full size):

Who is that rude fellow?! He will be one of the frequently recurring characters of Grindea, but you’ll have to play the game to find out more than that! ;)

-Surprise Limerick*–

If when playing you play with ambition
there will most likely be repetition,
and while I don’t mind
some old fashioned grind,
I love to have fun on my mission!

[*Pixel Ferrets does not guarantee that it is, in fact, a limerick. While the visuals are sweet in general, the combat was missing some sort of flair! To rectify this horrible injustice, Teddy joined Fred in a glorious, effect filled crusade!]

Next week: We start working on a new zone and bringing the game’s first act together!