Not much to say about this week’s post, except that we’re still working on the Halloween Forest! This week, Vilya has been working on some sweet set pieces, while Fred soldiers on with the many animations. Without further ado, let’s dive right into the pixels!

This here is the house of a candy cooking witch! Somewhere down the line, she must’ve realized candy was better for business than potions. Don’t eat her walls though; she won’t like that…

Here’s an old shrine in a small graveyard, tied to the ancient religion of the world.

On the animation side of things the scarecrow has sprung to life, ready to cause trouble for any collectors traveling through the Halloween Forest!

Next Week: You couldn’t guess: more halloween stuff!

As promised, we’ve been crunching away with the Halloween Forest this week! We’ve got the basic color scheme and props down, as well as nearly all of the enemies that will inhabit the region.

Apart from this screen, we’ve iterated the whole forest layout to something we feel pretty confident will work out, so what’s left now props wise is mostly bigger set pieces, like the witch’s cottage, and putting everything together in a nice way!

 

Here’s the enemy lineup Fred’s been working on

And below are idle animations for a couple of them!

• The pumpkin will be a cannonfodder-type enemy, which means there will be quite a lot of them, and they are pretty straightforward to defeat (but certainly more deadly than slimes and rabbits)
• The flying jack o’ lantern is a ranged type, and fires small projectiles at the players. He also scales with the number of players, shooting more projectiles if there are many players. His flames can be blocked with a shield, or even reflected if timed properly!
• The scarecrow is a tanky, melee type that can withstand several hits before going into hitstun. Using the shield to find openings is a dominant strategy here.
• Finally, the ghost is a harass type enemy, which stays invisible until it is in position for an attack. It appears as it charges, so you have some time to react, but will fade away again soon after the attack is finished. You’ll want to dispose of these buggers as soon as you see them! They are trickster ghosts of sorts, waiting around for unwary travelers to play with.

We’ll also be adding a plant enemy called Halloweed, which is an upgraded version of the flower you might’ve spotted in our videos. We’re still trying to nail his color scheme though, hence his absense in the lineup! He’ll use his vines to whack players that are close to him, but unlike his less agile brother, this guy will burrow and chase you underground if you’re out of his reach for too long!

Encountering all of these enemies all at once would certainly be a daunting (and frustrating) challenge, so we’ll spread them out a bit and try to make sure the spawn compositions are varied and well balanced!

Next Week: Even more halloween stuff will see the light!

Due to an unexpected turn of events, we’ve done some redecorating in our schedule. We’ve got a golden opportunity of merging working on Grindea with schoolwork, and we felt we had to take it! The flip side was that, since it’s a project course, we needed a somewhat isolated element of the game that would take about five weeks to complete.

We’ve chosen to create a new field in the game, and as such, the stuff we had planned to do will be frozen until this course is done. It’s mostly good news, since we’ll get more done, and all of us sort of secretly wanted to work on new environments and enemies. The updates will probably be more interesting as well, for that matter! However, due to this arrangement, we’ll postpone the beta testing as well. :(

To get our minds of that dark lining of the silver cloud, here are three very anatomically correct ferrets on top of each other!

This is our logo! We’ll have to throw together some nice font that says “Pixel Ferrets” too, but this is the core! We felt it was about time to get one, being nine months into development and all.

Now back to our plans for the coming weeks:

The area we’re going to create is temporarily called the Halloween Forest, but we plan on changing the name to something a bit more fun later on! The zone is somewhat scary (as you probably figured out from the name) yet still cute. The enemies and decorations will include things such as pumpkins, lanterns, candle lights, scarecrows, ghosts, mist and spooky trees. This is the home of the odd Candy Witch, a couple of wicked twins and a mysterious hooded man. It’s also here you will have the chance of helping a lonely scarecrow in a quest!

This is one of our favourite areas (at least to talk about) so we’re looking forward to a few entertaining weeks for all of us. We hope you’ll will like it as much as we do!

In-between all the planning of our new schedules and preparation for the new course, Fred has kick started operation Halloween Forest with its very first inhabitant, a little jumpin’ pumpkin!

There’s plenty more enemies to come during the following weeks; we have a total of five planned for this area.

Next Week: Enemies! Trees! Stuff! Halloween!

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!

This week has been a little bit all over the place! We have had about a hundred subjects to discuss and plan as a result of soon having to implement the city and all that comes with it.

In short we have designed a fishing mini-game and treasure map system, made a mockup of the arena, sent out descriptions for the next batch of songs we need, made concepts of the first real boss character and finally continued on the various things we left unfinished last week.

We also made some changes in the planning of what stuff to make first, but that is hardly interesting enough to be talking about: instead, let’s take a look at what our group members have been focusing on outside of these discussions.

In the animation department, Fred has continued working on the female bandit leader. So far she’s weighing in at around 20 animations with just one or two left before she’s all done! Here’s another sneak peek of her and her madness:

We know we mentioned NPCs last time, but as a result of changing things and priorities around a bit we’re afraid they will have to wait until after we’re done with the next big thing: the arena!

In the city building district Vilya finished off the houses, all of which are now more or less ready for implementation. Here’s a preview of three of the stores that will be featured in the shopping district:

Can you guess what they are? The purple one is the hat shop, the brown is a smithy and armory, the green is, of course, the alchemist’s potion shop.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“A black clad demon,
raging death in human form,
tamed by tester’s tears.”

(The boss is in the game. She was too difficult at first, but now she’s nicer)

Next Time: The arena takes shape and we go treasure hunting!

A big hug to everyone who’s subscribed to us on Facebook, Twitter and other places! Having people show interest in what you’re doing is a great morale boost.

Let’s celebrate with a recap of the past week!

Fred has made some sweet animations for our first miniboss: a familiar looking, female bandit leader! She’s no behemoth but she might still prove a challenge to the inexperienced adventurer.

Meanwhile, Vilya has started building houses for the main city while battling a terrible cold. The buildings below are common residencies – the shops and other special houses will have huge signs on the roof implying what use they have.

Here’s the sketch she used as reference:

And here’s the end result (still to be tweaked):

The city is going to be fairly big, featuring about 15 buildings (including a smithy, an alchemist store, a hat store, a café and more), a market and the grand Colosseum!

In the coding department, a recoloring shader was made to make the creation of new clothing colors easier. First, a tool turns every spritesheet into a Na’vi, and in-game the shader will recolor it.

This makes it possible to change the colors of individual pieces of clothing separately on the fly, without any additional asset loading.

Next time: The miniboss will be put into the game, and the citybuilding will continue! Maybe we’ll see some NPCs?!