This week, we have finished up one of the last enemy designs for the Winterland. As of now we call them Frostlings!

They are agile little creatures with a taste for mischief. Avoiding to get hit and blocking are preferred when fighting these little trouble makers since they have a habit of stealing gold from Collectors venturing through the Winterland! If they nab some of your cash, you’ll have to whack them with something hard before they escape with your life savings.

These cuties will probably pop up during one of Fred’s streaming sessions in the near future, getting some animation work done together with the rest of the Winterland enemy lineup!

Teddy has spent some time reworking how resetting puzzles work. Instead of our old “instant reset” we’ve implanted a sort of Braid-like system. Besides looking way cooler, this allows players to undo single moves instead of fully resetting the puzzle when caught in a deadlock.

Before:

After:

Click the pictures to view the animated GIFs.

Besides all the secret cool stuff we are currently working on, Fred has been hard at work in the effects workshop. Below is a new animation for when the player receives special items/powers as well as a mixed bag of other effects!

Hello again and welcome to yet another weekly recap! We’re still fighting on with the dungeon, with Teddy implementing the last things before fine-tuning sessions and multiplayer edits.

Vilya has revisited some of the maps of the dungeon this week as well, improving its overall look and feel. As an example, here’s one of the outdoor maps before the improvements:

And here’s a couple of shots after:

As we’ve been stressing – it’s all in the details, and visual improvements will most likely keep being implemented all over the world of Grindea when there’s time.

When it comes to the animation department, Fred started working on the Yeti enemy we showed a few weeks back. Below are some idle animations created during a streaming session from last night.

Shout out to everyone who tuned in and kept him company, we’re gonna be doing streams a bit more often in the future since Fred has upgraded his 4 year old laptop to one of Teddy’s 4 year old desktops!

If you want to be notified when the stream starts, make sure to subscribe to Fred’s twitch channel here.

In other animation news, there’s also a level 3 version of the Summon Plant spell! As you could probably guess, it has increased range compared to the lower levels, and of course it also deals more damage.

However, perhaps the most important feature is its increased cuteness:

Last but not least, we’re very excited to have received our very first fan art! This piece was made by Crispat87 during the streaming session last night.

Thanks a lot man, we really appreciate it! :D

Christmas is drawing near, and we’ve been putting up Christmas decorations and hunting for presents, but that hasn’t stopped us from at least getting some work done on the game!

The miniboss is coming along nicely. As mentioned in the last recap, he can dash across the stage as an invulnerable ball of light, firing bullets all around him. When in physical form, he’ll fire another pattern the player will need to traverse before being able to punish him!

Even normal mode is a bit tricky…

…but hard mode brings it to 11! 

Hmm… I wonder what he’ll be like in the Arena Challenge! As you can probably tell from the screenshots, the temple is flying high above the ground. Perhaps now the birds will make more sense as an enemy :D

Speaking of enemies, here’s the last regular enemy of the dungeon, the Brawler Bot:

These guys can quickly close the gap between you with the help of a rocket dash, followed by a straight punch to the face! One or two of them is not really a problem, but in numbers they start to surround you. If they get shielded by a blue Guardian Crystal, you might be in some trouble!

This week also marks the sad end of Fred’s tablet, a Bamboo Wacom, previously thought indestructible. RIP Mr. Bamboo :(

The following couple of weeks, the updates might not be all that substantial due to the holidays, but we’ll probably manage to squeeze something in!

This week our work with the dungeon has continued! Fred and Teddy has kept crunching back in Visby, fiddling around with the various mechanics and animations for the enemies in the flying dungeon.

One of their latest creations is this little fellow, a robot that will feature as a mini-boss halfway (or so) through the dungeon!

The robot might not look like much in this form, but he’s a nasty one! He’s been programmed to transform himself into a swarm of magic orbs, beaming across the room while damaging everything in his way. Your only chance to kill him is in the scarce moments when he’s actually still in this physical form! But beware, he might have a surprise in store as you come close as well…

While the boys have been working on that, Vilya has been preparing the rooms in which the enemies will be found. Some of them can be seen here (click to enlarge the pictures):

This it the room that comes just before the boss room. You will begin your journey here and come back to it in the end, after you successfully managed to unlock the door by starting three different machines throughout the dungeon.

This room will house one of the puzzles of the dungeon, which is directly related to a skill you’ll learn here. The skill allows you to beam from one area in a room to another. How it will be done will be explained later – there will also be a visual cue where it is possible.

Expect to see more of the dungeon next week! :3

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:

Greenlight

First and foremost, thanks to all of you who voted on us over at our Steam Greenlight page. Thanks to all of you, we just got Secrets of Grindea greenlit and ready to be on Steam as soon as it’s finished!

This week it’s finally been time for us to build a new area! It’s a somewhat traditional forest-y area which houses one new enemy, the bowman’s house and a mysterious mansion…

While it’s not in the game yet (soon!), here’s a WIP preview of what it’ll look like:

Yes, as you might guess that means it’s soon time for the bow to reappear in the game! It won’t have its own skill tree like the traditional weapons, but we hope you’ll like it none the less. We’ll talk more about the bow once it’s actually implemented along with the rest of this area.

As for the new enemy, it’s of course the boar that has made an appearance on this blog before! This time, however, it’s animated – and out to get you!

Can you name the Ragnarok Online inspiration? ;)

Now, back to area-building! With some luck, there might be yet another area available soon after this one.. :>

Here’s the death animation for another enemy from our beloved Pumpkin Forest, this time it’s the Scarecrow’s turn to bite the dust.

Besides keeping up with the death animations from last week, Fred took the time to work on the sprite for a new enemy in the game. Aside from being cute and round, this fierce piggy will have the ability to charge the player with incredible force, not even stopping when smashing into the otherwise very useful shield!

Above is a patchwork of the different iterations he went through before we settled on a little more juicy version. The last three are different color variations of the same sprite. Since we already have another brown cuddly creature hanging around in the same area (the Rabby) we figured it would be good to separate them a bit from each other! We might still go with brown and just not have Rabbys and boars in the same zone, though.

Meanwhile, Vilya has been going strong in her portrait factory:

This week, there’s been a ton of skill work done, and of course the thousand year battle of the GUI rages on. Menus aren’t exactly the most exciting thing in the world to show, and they aren’t even fully implemented yet, so this week we’ll treat you with two animated screencap gifs of the new skills!

Click it!

This here spell is our first summon spell! It will summon a lightning cloud which hovers around, doubling as damage dealer and moral support (dat smile)! This is the first level of the skill. Later levels include features like targeting flying enemies, more damage, faster attack speed and less glee.

While it’s not set in stone, we’re toying with the thought of having summons be permanent (until you dismiss them). Instead of costing mana as you cast them, they would “block out” a part of your mana bar. That is, if you summon something which costs 30 % of your mana, for as long as you have that summon in play, those 30 % will not regenerate!

Click this too!

The gif above showcases one of our one handed weapon skills: Blade Flurry*!

It’s basically a series of very fast hitting strikes right in front of the character. It’s superb for exploiting openings in duels, like versus this lone Halloweed. It also has a very quick charge speed to offset its limited area of effect. The speed and duration of the move changes as you charge it, and later levels will have a fierce finishing strike to add even more damage!

For those of you yearning for another video… stay tuned! Some day, when the planets are aligned, it’ll appear!

This week, we’re taking shelter from the spooky forest inside some buildings! Vilya has been busy creating the cozy, candy filled house of the witch, as well as a substantially less picturesque abandoned house…

Click on the screens for enlarged versions!

Fred has mainly been busy with cleaning up all of the basic attack animations for all of the enemies. Here’s a sample of this week’s workload in form of everyone’s favorite flying pumpkin wizard, the Jack O’ Lantern:

We’ve also been working on getting some lighting going to boost the atmosphere in the forest, and after some sweet feedback from Reddit, this is what it looks like at the moment (click it!):

If you have any feedback, don’t hesitate to make a noise in the comments! :)

Next Week: Hurr durr ‘loween