We keep working on the Temple, which is coming alone nicely! Vilya has finished almost all rooms, except for a few which will house special challenges or (mini-) bosses that we need to design a bit more before creating their rooms.

Here’s the last few rooms she made before returning to portrait painting:

Some of these rooms will have animated obstacles and details added by Fred at a later stage, so stay tuned for that!

Teddy, in the meanwhile, has been working on prototyping some of the enemies that you’ll encounter in the temple. Here’s a screen of one such battle in action:

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 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!)

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!

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!

Another week has past by with some decent progress being made! Teddy has been away to act as yet another judge, this time for the Swedish Game Awards which we happened to win last year. Best of luck to all the participants!

Vilya has been busy adding more touch ups to Mount Bloom. Below is a picture of an area that will hold one of the many side quests Mount Bloom has to offer. Crystal mining is risky business, even for seasoned Collectors!

Fred has been working on animations for a couple of upcoming skills, mainly from the One Handed Weapons-tree. Below are some effects for one of the new skills, at the moment named “Shadow Clone“.

We’ll hopefully be able to talk more in depth about them next week when they’ve been properly implemented into the game.

As some of you noticed, last week there was no recap, due to us all being invited to serve as judges at Gotland Game Conference, an event held each year at our old university! We all had a blast, but we couldn’t work that much on the game and as such didn’t feel we had enough to show. A huge congratulations to the well-deserved winners of the “Pwnage Award”, the first year students who made CoBots!

Now we’re back in the groove and working again, so here’s a taste of what we’re doing!

First off, since we’ve made a bunch new magic spells, we felt we needed to expand on the weapon skills as well. First in line is a two handed weapon skill which has been temporarily (and creatively) dubbed throw!

As always, click the image for an animated gif!

The reason for adding the throw skill was to add the potential of using ranged attacks with weapons. Currently it doesn’t have quite as long range as some of the spells, but it’s enough to open up some strategical options. The further you throw the weapon, the greater the damage will be when it hits. We’re toying with different ways to use the fact that you actually throw away your weapon!

It’s a pretty powerful spell considering it slices through all enemies in its path, so we’re considering having a significant mana cost that can be partially refunded by picking up the weapon again, or maybe even disabling the weapon from being used again until some time has passed or the player collects the weapon!

This could create some interesting gameplay, but at the same time we have to be careful not to cause unnecessary confusion or frustration. Expect this skill to have evolved quite a bit before final release!

In the meantime, Vilya has revisited the Winterland area and added a bunch of new props and decorations! Here’s a shot of some tribal inspired environment made to match the Frostling enemy which Fred’s been animating over the past few weeks.

New week, new area! We decided to venture underground for this one, but we still wanted to keep the lushes nature of an outdoors area. So we simply decided the combine the two, to create Mount Bloom.

Filled with enormous mushrooms and strange vegetation, the cave system of Mount Bloom is one of the oldest and largest in all of Grindea. Home to both hostile creatures  and friendly crystal miners in need of help, Mount Bloom is a true test for even the more experienced collectors. Poisonous spores act as a natural defense for anyone who ventures to deep and some even say the caves used to be nesting grounds for dragons.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally got a proper work station set up! While working on the kitchen table definitely had its perks, it’s nice to have the “office” up and running.

Since Vilya lives all the way down in the Netherworld, we have set up Teddy’s good old Netbook to act as a permanent satellite uplink!

This week we have focused on adding those small details that tend to make an area feel more alive. Often it’s not the way you make the biggest or most important sprites that makes an area nice, it’s in how you decorate and add details. Here’s some examples of the improvements we made:

Here’s another example, where we did not only add decorations, but also changed the layout quite a bit:

In this room we planned to block the way up the stairs to a key until you solve a puzzle using the machine to the right. However, as we thought about it we realized it would probably be cooler if solving the puzzle itself was enough to unlock the door. Therefore we made the room smaller before redecorating it to look a bit more interesting.

Lastle, here’s an animated gif of what the walls will look like in the game:

We’re really excited about how the dungeon is coming together, and we hope you guys will like it as well.

As we’re writing this we’re also well on our way of refining a specific part of the dungeon where we plan on recording that video we talked about in the previous post. Hopefully we’ll be able to include it in one of the coming recaps!

After gaining weight and laziness over the duration of our little break, it’s finally time to start getting back to work.

Vilya’s still trying to keep the spirit of christmas alive by making sprites for our winter area:

There’s christmas trees, snowmen, and lots and lots of snow, as you can see! Of course, no area is complete without hats, so it’s time we started making a few of those as well:

Another piece of development news, which will be very exciting to some, and not-so-exciting to others, is that we’re working on some translation tools! We’ve gotten quite a few offers to have fansub groups translate our game to various languages, and if there are fans out there who want to bring the game to their non-English speaking countrymen, why not let them?

Basically, it’s a set of tools that can be used by anyone to change dialogue (and other texts). You have access to everything you need, like coloring parts of the text, or adding conditional phrases (like having a character say different things depending on character gender, or how many is in your party). By saving it into the game’s language folder, you can then select it in game.

Our hopes are that the tools will be used to make better translations than we’d be able to get even if we hired someone to help us! In their final version, the goal is to have good support for collaboration, with options to merge different language files and keep the best translated lines.

Also, having an approach like this can let players choose between, say, a literal translation by one group and an idiomatic translation by another. Perhaps a fan with a great knack of dialogue writing will even release an improved English version!

What happened to the dungeon? Fear not, it hasn’t been forgotten! We’ll most likely get back to it in the coming week, after discussing how to proceed :)