Back from Dreamhack and onto working, we’ve dived right back into the Temple of Seasons!

Vilya is closing in on finishing up all the rooms, so here’s a few of the more recent one she’s been making:

We felt we wanted to try out enemy compositions as soon as possible, so Fred has taken a break from transition animations and returned focus to the enemies!

Here’s a set of animations for the Autumn Wizard:

Just like with the Season Knight we posted a while back, the Season Wizards will come in three different varieties. Just like with the Knights, if the season of the room matches the wizard’s colors, it will gain a powerful special ability!

To combat the enemies of the temple effectively, you’ll have to pay close attention to the season of the enemies you’re fighting, and try to alter the environment to counter it. Sometimes, when you’re fighting enemies of mixed seasons, you’ll just have to pick your poison!

While waiting for the art assets, Teddy has also began tinkering on the housing part of the game! It’s unclear when this will be added to the game proper, but at least the foundation has been laid.

To compensate for all the good looking art, here’s a screenshot of a masterpiece created in-game with the super early prototype:

The Flowering Benches – Teddy van Brugh (2014)

This week we’ve continued working on the Temple of Seasons. It will be one of the most graphically heavy areas of the game since both enemies and scenery will have three different variations, so our grahpic duo have wasted no time getting started!

Below is one of the early rooms of the temple in all of its autumny glory.

If you missed it a few weeks ago, Vilya have started up a workblog that goes a lot more indepth about the graphical assets she’s making, like the room seen above. Be sure to check it out!

Fred have spent the week finishing up all of the animations for the Summer varation of the Knight enemies we showed off a while ago. The Summer Knight will work as a base for both the Fall and Winter versions. Besides different weapons, each enemy will have their own set of unique moves they will have access to if the area is set to their season.

Above is the Summer Knights special move, a high damaging single target attack with Guard Crush (instantly destroys your shield if not perfect guarded) and a huge knockback.

Besides fancy special attack, the knights will be the first enemy in the game that uses shields. The enemy shields will work similar to player shields in terms that they have their own HP and can break if taking too much damage.

This week we’ve continued to push ahead! Right now we’re working on an odd factory in the midst of the snowy fields we’ve been talking about recently. Here’s what the exterior looks like right now:

The Christmas Present, an enemy we’ve shown a while back, will be one of the many challenges lurking around within the Factory. Instead of normal projectiles, we’ve gone with a more explosive approach!

 

Aside from building the factory exterior, Vilya has also kept on remaking portraits. Here’s the latest batch of those, all inhabitants of the winter area:

 

With the latest Frontline update, the story is slowly but steadily starting to take a more central role. With that, some of the more important characters have been in need of some touch ups. Just like Marino, your friendly neighbor Luke has received a graphical update:

(Now, we know there are many more sprites that could use some touch-ups as well, but for now we’re only going to focus on characters that play some part in the main story. We want to keep pushing ahead, after all, and remaking too much would quickly turn into a time sink of black hole-ish proportions where we get better at drawing and remake graphics in a never-ending circle. Therefore we’ll try to save most touch-ups for the post-production, so bear with us until then!)

This week, we’ve managed to push out a new content update for the Frontline beta. The main focus of the update is the new Marino Encounter, as well as some new cut scenes setting up where the story is heading next.

The update is not massive in size but we are still very much interested in hearing feedback from you guys who are in the beta, especially about the Marino fight. Was it too hard, too easy, any suggestions how to make it more interesting?

The in house testing has been a bit all over the place ranging from it being “impossible” to “I’ve played this game so much I don’t even know if it’s hard”. We’ve set up a thread over at the forums where you can post any suggestions and thoughts you have about the fight, it would really help us a ton!

With this update out of the way, we are already hard at work with the next one. Below are the sprites for the rest of the Season Fae Elders, which all will play a crucial role during your visit in the Winterland!

With the beta now up and running on Steam, feedback and bug reports have been flowing in like never before, to Teddy’s combined delight and despair! In times like these, the ability to quickly roll out patches on Steam really shines. In fact, it’s so easy to update that a better way of delivering patch notes was in order. As such, one of the week’s additions to the game is an in-game patch note viewer!

Whenever the game has updated and there’s new patch notes, a notice will appear on the start menu informing you about this. By pressing Tab, you can access all recorded patch notes.

The game records when you played it last, and if you have missed more than one update, you’ll have an option to aggregate the patches. This will create a combined patch note showing every addition, change and bug fix in all patch notes since the last time you played, allowing you to catch up easily!

Fred has stepped away from the flavor and NPC-crafting (for now) and started working on some new enemies. Below are some of the enemies that will pop up in the upcoming Season Change Temple (working title).

Like the name implies, changing seasons will be the main focus of the Season Change Temple. Player will be able to change season between Fall, Winter and Summer (spring is excluded for a reason!) with each season affecting the dungeon both visually and gameplay wise.

The season change-ability will be the main ingredient of the puzzles of the dungeon, but it will also effect the enemies within it. As seen above, every enemy comes in 3 different versions that each represents a different season. For example, changing the season to Summer will boost the stats of all summer enemies as well as allow them to use certain skills. The same goes for the other seasons!

To round things up, here’s the idle animation for the Summer Knight!

 

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, 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 :)

After a few weeks of vacation and rest, we’ve been itching to get back to work! First of, we would like to thank all of you who played the beta and took time to write your first impressions. We’ve been going over all the feedback and there’s been tons of useful suggestions from everyone. We’ve already decided upon a few big changes, revamping the early parts of the game a bit to make the story more present being one of them. So once again, thank you.

In other work related news!
With just a few animations missing here and there, the Winterland enemies are getting very close to completion. Below are some animations for the Christmas present enemy we showed a while back.

We’ve also decided to add another version of the Christmas present in form of a ranged, green sibling.

We hope you have all enjoyed this summer as much as we have! Stay tuned for more updates and weekly recaps as usual from now on :)

Hello guys! This week we’ve been busy finishing off the last remaining things in and around the dungeon. There are still some tweaks we’d like to add, but for now the dungeon is complete and ready to be tested!

This means that at long last, it’s time to update the beta! To celebrate this new patch we’re gonna invite a bunch of new people that get to try the game out – hopefully you’re among them! :)

The beta should be uploaded before the end of the week, and invites will be sent shortly after. If you haven’t signed up for beta access yet, be sure to post a message in this thread over at Desura to have a chance of being selected!

Now, we’re also moving on with more stuff for the winter fields which we’ve shown you previously! It won’t be included in this patch, but here’s another sneak peek of what you’ll find there:

Yeti death animation!

A special attack which will freeze you if you’re not careful!

A bunch of random drops

One of the secrets we’re most excited about adding to Grindea are the microbosses!

Microbosses are unique enemies that are usually related to the normal mobs in some way, but are way stronger. A tiny taste of this that’s currently in the beta is the white rabby. 

He might look cute and fluffy, but he’s the #2 cause of death in the game

Most players enjoy the addition of the white rabby, but he’s not quite as interesting as we want most microbosses to be, since he has no extra moves except some tweaked base properties (more mobility, more health, more damage, more stun resistance etc).

During the past week, one of Fred’s tasks has been to create a microboss we hope will be a better example of what we want to achieve: the Frostling Leader!

 

The Frostling Leader will have a moveset inspired by the two regular Frostling monsters, the melee Rogue and the ranged Scoundrel. Our hope is to have it nearly as interesting to fight as a full fledged miniboss, but with way less workload regarding the visual design. A win-win situation if we ever heard of one!