This week, things have been moving along smoothly in the boss department. Teddy has pushed the prototype to a more or less finished state, adding a bunch of new attacks and patterns both for normal and hard mode. There’s still some fine tuning to be done, but the battle is fully playable at this stage. All that is left now is some graphical polish and of course, player feedback!

Below are some of the new attacks Teddy have been messing around with. We can’t wait to see all the “Let’s plays” of people getting wrecked by this one!

A hard mode/low HP version of an attack we showed the other week. Every attack, even in normal mode, will have a harder version that the boss will use when she reaches a certain amount of HP.

Even with the place holder ice graphics, this one is pretty self explanatory. On its own it’s rather simple to avoid, but once the boss herself starts moving around it becomes another story!

This attack was suggested by Own over at the forums (thanks buddy!). Once again, this is the normal version. Don’t let the soothing motion fool you, things will get nastier as time progresses!

Besides boss stuff, Vilya has kept working on the second zone of the dungeon. Below is the “Government building”, where a lot of the administrative tasks of Tai Ming gets handled.

Fred has been busy with NPC and cutscene stuff, which will be a common commodity in Tai Ming through out the dungeon!

A new week and – you guessed it – more Tai Ming!

Among the things added to the village last week was an Inn (which pretty much would be Grindea’s first real Inn – at least in Story Mode)!

The beginning of a dam (it will also have a “mouth” that will open or close depending on how you use it, but Fred will add that later cause it needs to be animated):

And an… ape house(?!) with its surrounding area, which includes some market stands that will sell familiar items:

Fred has also been busy adding NPCs to the village, so here’s a few more:

Lookie! A dog! It’s the very first dog in Grindea!! How exciting as that?

As for Teddy, as you can guess, he has continued working on the boss and added the first area’s background & it’s props to the game! Phew!

Now, on to even more Tai Ming things! See you next week :D

It’s a new week, and time for a new blog post! This week there was another patch, which also is up on the stable beta now. That means those of you who play on Stable can finally experience Mount Bloom and all it’s secrets!

In the newest patch we also added this little fellow to the game:

He’s a traveling merchant which will be in town selling a bunch of new weapons and gear during the festival. If you already played through the festival, you don’t have to worry though! His stock will be added to the other stores in town once he leaves :)

Other than that it’s business as usual: working on Tai Ming! Vilya has continued destroying the background, and soon there’s really not much left to ruin:

It’s a new week, and a new recap!

Last week ended up being spent both on the final Mount Bloom things as well as the next temple. Teddy started off the week prototyping the optional phase puzzle challenge(s), and while we were sending them around for in-house testing, we simultaneously worked ahead with designing the next upcoming enemy visuals and improving our old temple backgrounds.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – first, let’s take a look at said prototypes….

First up is a new type of puzzle mechanic, where you have to avoid getting hit by sparks by shooting yourself back and forth between two of those “donkey barrels”. This gets increasingly harder, starting with you just having to avoid tiny stationary sparks, but after a while there will be long lines of spark moving in the opposite direction of your barrels.

When we’re adding the real artwork for this (keep in mind all you see here is strictly WIP and/or placeholder), we want the sparks exchanged for fields of electricity instead, that can be short or long depending on the difficulty of the part of the challenge.

There will, of course, be regular puzzles as well – only much harder than the ones you encountered in the main story portion of the game! Figuring out where to go, how to get there and – perhaps most important of all – knowing exactly when to shoot yourself out of the barrels will be crucial in these puzzles!

Once we were satisfied with the prototypes, Vilya went ahead and started working on getting the actual background art in place:

Okay, but what about the temple stuff?! Well, as you may remember, a while ago Vilya was working on the first zone of the temple (which in fact is a time travel village, so we should probably stop calling it a temple). This week she continued this work, adding a bunch of details to the upper part of the map:

As for the enemies, here’s what the current lineup looks like:

As always, these are subject to change or redesign as we work ahead! For now though, there’s a cute little worm, a mysterious patch of moss (?!), an annoying monkey, and a statue on a rampage!

These guys will appear in the present state of the time travel village, where everything is abandoned, ruined and overgrown (kind of continuing on the whole Mount Bloom theme, but using a different approach). Provoked by the presence of the artifact, even the statues come to life to haunt you! Oh no!

But first, we gotta finish those Mount Bloom side quests….. So, see you next week! :D

Another week in which we continue to finishing up the Mt Bloom! Vilya continues to create backgrounds for the challenges:

(WIP here)

(WIP #1!)
(WIP #2!)

Plus a few more portraits! These should be the last vital portraits before the frontline update which will contain the main quest and challenges of the mountain. Once that’s all in place we’ll move on to adding a few side quests / activities, which means there might be one or two more later on (after the frontline update):

Meanwhile, Fred has been working on a bunch of effects & decorations, PLUS an upcoming boss…! It won’t be part of the coming update, but since Fred has finished his tasks for it he has started working on what’s coming next…

Our aim is to have the frontline patch ready by this weekend, unless something unforeseen (such as big scary bugs) happens, so let’s cross our fingers everything goes smoothly throughout the week!

This week we’ve continued our work with finishing up Mount Bloom and its challenges! Vilya has started working on the various challenge backgrounds needed for the Phase- and Poison Puzzles:

She also made a bunch of new puzzle blocks to go with it (a bit more advanced than the ones from last week):

As well as two additional portraits for the miner NPCs found in the mine:

We also had to expand on one of the Mount Bloom maps, to make room for the entrance to one of the challenges:

Meanwhile, Fred has focused on decorating the cave, adding tiny waterfalls, destructible mushrooms, and a ton of animated edges around every pool of water, among other things:

Next week will be pretty much the same, with Vilya focusing on more challenge backgrounds and Teddy implementing it all, all while Fred decorates the hell out of the area so it’ll look as awesome as possible! Stay tuned~ :)

This week we’ve kept focusing on the phase puzzles, and we’ve finally decided on a set of prototypes! There will be no less than 5 phase puzzles as part of this challenge, although the first ones will be kind of easy and serve as an introduction! :)

Here are some GIFs showing parts of the upcoming puzzles you’ll see (all with placeholder graphics that will be replaced ASAP):

As you can see, we’ve upgraded the block graphics now, so the arrow blocks/barrels that suck you in are actually more or less in their final state. The green ones always point in the same direction, while the pink ones change the direction in which it will launch you when you next press the phase button. We’ve also added proper mirror blocks and squares to this prototype, but we’re gonna do some additional work on them.

Basically, since this place has been abandoned for hundreds of years, we figured they shouldn’t look as clean as they currently are. So, we put Vilya to work, adding cracks, moss & greenery to them in order to make them look more worn. We’ll be continuing this work and show even more variations next week, so stay tuned for that!

Now, back to the Phase Puzzle lobby from last week! We already created the basic room, but left out details, as these blocks weren’t made yet and we definitely wanted to incorporate parts of them as decorations in the room. Time to dive back in:

And speaking of diving back in… In between this Vilya has also been making more improvements on the Time Travel Zone, this time improving upon a garden, as well as adding another portrait, of a priest’s apprentice:

Next week we’ll continue transforming our crude prototypes into real areas with real art. Teddy has already started putting everything together, so hopefully you’ll be able to venture through these challenges from start to finish in the not too far away future! And after that it’s finally onto the next temple… :3

Another week has  gone by, and it’s time to show you some more stuff from the upcoming Mt. Bloom challenges!

As we’ve mentioned before, the final challenge will be a series of Phase Puzzle- and poison gas challenges. Well, the Phase Puzzle challenge parts will take place in a complex of the same origin as Flying Fortress, hidden in the mountain! And as such, we needed a lobby to set the mood for the upcoming challenges.

Here’s a BG for this, that Vilya has been working on (details such as greenery pushing through from the mountain, and other smaller decoration will be added later):

Now, as for the Phase Puzzles themselves – we’ve begun prototyping them and here’s our VERY CRUDE starting point (ALL graphics are placeholder and will absolutely not be in the final version, lol):

Basically, you’ll phase shift from one point to the other, but have to avoid platforms floating back and fourth while doing so! In this image, the platforms are represented by boulders, but in the final version they will be actual Flying Fortress-esque platforms driven by the same kind of magic that keeps Flying Fortress afloat!

To spice things up a bit, we’re also adding mirror blocks, that like the mentioned platforms, float back and forth as well, so you have to mind your timing when shooting at them:

Here’s a little GIF showing it all in motion, with a third special obstacle, a moving platform which sucks you into itself, and keeps you in there until you press the Phasing button again:

We’re currently working on applying the correct graphics for each of the puzzle blocks, so hopefully they will look more awesome in the next update! In the meanwhile, here are some other things Vilya has been working on for the Time Travel Temple, which will be your next destination once you get through the Phase Puzzles!

First up, another portrait:

Then, some more detail work on that first map that we started improving last week. First up, some more flowers:

Also, something bamboo-inspired and some other types of greenery – cause, why not?

We also played around with recoloring the barrels and crates around the map, to see if we could have them fit the theme better:

Finally, Vilya improved on the entrance decoration, editing the colors and adding a bit more detail to it:

And here’s what it all looks like right now! I think it’s starting to come together, and it’s time to move on to the next part of the map :) What do you think?

Hello guys! It’s me, Vilya (actually, I’m the one writing almost all Weekly Recaps, but you wouldn’t know that I guess)!

Today, Fred left town to go home and spend Christmas with his family, and Teddy got the flu and is out of business right now (hopefully he’ll get better in time for the actual holidays). SO I’m sitting here alone tonight, writing this rather late recap, which will also be the last one this year! We’re taking a break until New Years, so we’ll return with the Weekly Recaps on January 11 when we’ve had a week of work back at the office :)

Now, what have we been up to this last week of work? Well, pretty much a bit of everything, as always!

This is a background I’ve made which you’ll pass through after completing the Flower Challenge that we’ve been showing prototypes of lately. Basically you just go in, grab whatever’s in the chest, and leave, so it’s pretty straight forward:

A little bonus GIF of the steps:

Next up, a short map connecting two of the cave areas with each other. Again, just a short breather room:

There’s also this odd portrait of a rather strange mushroom-man! What the-?!

No further comments on that… yet :)

Fred, meanwhile, has been working on a set of miners that will appear throughout the cave, minding their own business or hindering yours:

I know a lot of you want to know more about what Teddy does on the programming side as well, so I’ll tell you this: lately he has been focusing on adding multiplayer support for the challenges we made so far, as well as actually starting to prototype the third one properly! Yay!

He has also been working on ways to make the lag less annoying to those of you who have friends living further away, and he actually even prepared a bunch of graphics to show you how he’s doing it. However, since he’s sick right now, I think we’ll have to save that for next year since he can probably explain that stuff a lot better than I can :)

Speaking of next year: I wish you all an awesome holiday, filled with happiness (and perhaps some fun gaming?!)! You guys are such an amazing community and we’re all so thankful for you support! We’ll keep working on making Secrets of Grindea even better, with much more content next year, and I hope you’ll join us for the ride!

See you in a couple of weeks! :D

We’re entering the final stages of finishing the first two challenges! We’ve also done some more prototyping for the third, but we’re still not 100% satisfied with that one yet, so it needs some more work.

Anyway! Since we’ve more or less finished the flower challenge, it’s time for it to get a proper background! So here it is, along with a step-by-step gif showing how Vilya created it:

Since it’s almost time to start battling stuff in Mt Bloom, there were a couple of more hats that needed to be made as well (what are quest rewards or item drops without one or two hats, right?). Here are three Mt Bloom themed hats, plus a duck beak for good measure:

Oh, and of course there needs to be a couple of NPCs to guide (or hinder) your progress through the cave system. Here’s one such NPC, a miner, whose portrait Vilya made last week:

Fred has been busy making sprites of said NPCs! Here’s a few sprites for the Cavelings Vilya put together last week: