The past week, the Marino battle has been the main implementation focus. Here’s a little teaser gif from it:

Clicketyclick!

For Marino, we wanted to create a battle that was more up close and personal than most other boss battles. In terms of style, it’s most similar to fighting Vilya, but this time it’s not part of some camouflaged tutorial. Marino is quick, slippery and will cut you up if you’re sloppy!

Speaking of boss battles, Fred is already at work with creating assets for another one, which will have the player face new challenges…

CHOO-CHOO, TRAINS YO!!

Are you tired of watching gifs and reading about new skills? Hopefully not, because here’s a skill super post about what we’ve cooked together over the past week!

First out of the gates is the revamped Spirit Slash, which has gone from a pure AoE spell to distributed targeting, and at the same time gone through a big visual makeover.

Click to view animated gif!

As you release the Spirit Slash, it will start picking targets around you, striking at enemies one after the other until the max number of slashes has been reached. If there’s only one target around, each consecutive strike will deal slightly less damage.

Due to its random and non-instant nature, it’s a bit trickier to use than regular AoE-attacks (like the Whirlslash or Ice Nova), but also fits into more situations. At close range, it can be used as a simple damage amplifier both to single and multiple targets, and when battling slow enemies it can even be used for kiting.

Then we have the new earth based skill Insect Swarm, which shockingly isn’t a type of lettuce, but a swarm of insects!

Click on it, we dare you!

The Insect Swarm spell is a soft-summon, meaning they behave like a pet but for a limited time only, and they only consume energy rather than block it out completely. The other soft-summon in the game is the Plant spell, which we added way back!

When cast, an insect swarm will spawn from the tip of your hands, traveling straight forward. If it hits an enemy, it will swarm around it, dealing damage over time until the swarm dies off, or the enemy is defeated. If the swarm gets the last hit on a monster, it will revive a portion of its lost members, increasing its duration. When the targeted enemy dies, regardless who killed it, the swarm will move on to another target and continue dealing damage until the last insect has died off.

While the spell is easy to use and deals consistent damage (unless you miss completely), getting optimal results is a bit more tricky. Due to its self-healing mechanic on kills, you’ll get more damage out of targeting monsters with low health, making it suitable as a follow up after softening enemies up with something else.

Last off, we’ve implemented the Flame Thrower silver charge!

Unlike the regular version, which required you to stay put in order to complete the channel, silver charge lets you strafe around while casting, opening up for new and more efficient ways to use it.

If you just can’t get enough, here’s a VOD of a massive 8 hour stream Fred did, featuring mostly animation work but also some Arcade Mode gameplay.

Once again, Teddy have been hard at work in the Skills Workshop. This week we present the third and final skill of the Air-tree, the Wind Slash.

Click to view animated gif!

The Wind Slash is another projectile based skill. What makes it  stand out from the rest of our skills is the way you fire the projectiles.

The moment you start charging the Wind Slash, a spinning, double edged arrow appears under your character. Once the charge is released, two Wind Blades will shoot out from the character in the directions that the arrow is pointing, damaging all enemies they pass through.

At higher charge levels, a second arrow will appear spinning in the opposite direction, firing an extra pair of Wind Blades. This makes it possible to land double hits if the arrows are aligned during the charge release.
The Wind Blade is deviously hard to control, demanding good positioning and timing. If used correctly however, it has the ability to deal tons of damage to multiple enemies at once!

Other than skills, we’ve spent a good amount of time focusing on balancing Arcade Mode. Besides changing a ton of small things such as damage numbers, item costs and skill nerfs, we’re also investigating changes regarding health recovery.

The health recovery is a major element that really ramps up the difficulty in Arcade Mode compared to Story Mode. In Story Mode, every enemy has a chance of dropping a Health Orb which restores some of your lost health. The chance of enemies dropping orbs is also increased the lower your characters HP gets. To top it all off, your death only means having to replay a small portion of the game!

In Arcade Mode, Health Orbs can only be obtained by either clearing a floor or receiving them as a reward for clearing a Challenge or Bet. While this makes things a lot more unforgiving and challenging (which is what we want Arcade Mode to be!) it also makes it incredibly difficult to mount a come back if you’ve taken some heavy hits in a room, and if you die, that’s the end of your run.

To mitigate this, we’ve messed around with adding a small health regain every time you managed to clear a room quickly enough to get the S-grade. What (we hope) this will do is promote more aggressive and risky play when your characters HP is low in hopes of receiving the S-grade and added health regain.

One drawback to this is the creation of an artificial “skill bump”; a player will get better and better at a relatively steady pace, but when he starts getting S-ranks with some consistency the game suddenly becomes easier, possibly causing an unintended spike in the player’s progress. We’re still experimenting with this to achieve the best balance!

In addition, or as an alternative, we’re also adding a nurse, which will appear at semi-random intervals and offer you healing for cold, hard cash. The more health you’ve obtained this way, the steeper the price! Our hope is that this will make gold management more interesting than it is now, since buying a better weapon in a shop might mean less healing if you run into a nurse, and the other way around. This solution also opens up healing to every player, regardless if they have the skill to clear a room with S-rank!

The balancing act of both Arcade and Story Mode is a task that we’ll keep wrestling with up until release, but hey, that eternal struggle is one of the twisted appeals of our trade :)

We’ve mentioned before that we are putting a lot of effort into making our quests and side quests stand out from the regular “Collect X and return here”-formula. While Collect Quests will be present (you are playing as a Collector after all!) they will not appear as frequently as in your average RPG.

The Winterland will be no different, with a bunch of different tasks for the players to handle. One of those tasks involves cleaning up the old Toy Factory and shutting down the Christmas Gift Machine within that has gone berserk!

Staying within the Winterland, Vilya has been hard at work putting together some proper cards for some of the beloved monsters roaming around in the snow!

Finally, we’re also keeping up the effort to gradually bring old stuff up to par. For example, we’ve  reworked how the Teleport Plates gets activated and we’ve given the fireball spell a trail effect, making it feel a bit more fancy:

 BEFORE:

AFTER:

Click to view as animated gifs

As the game has grown larger, the need for a quicktravel has become more and more apparent. We’ve always planned to include such a system, and since you need it to travel back and forth to the flying temple now was the time to actually implement it!

In order to get a neat looking and functional interface for the quick travel, we also needed another detail we’ve postponed for a long time: the World Map!

At the start of the game, you can only see Startington and Pillar Mountains, but as you visit new areas the fog disappears and you can view them on your World Map. During your travels, you’ll also run into so-called Teleport Plates.

By stepping on such a plate, you’ll activate it, adding a new quicktravel node to your map! Afterwards, you can visit the map to create a teleportation field to that location.

You can’t teleport at any time, though. For example, you can’t teleport when stuck in a challenge or fighting a boss!

This week, we’re continuing our efforts to put new skills into the game! This time we’ve been focusing on the one-handed weapon skills, and put together two entirely new ones for you to try out!

The first one is a spell which summons shadow clones of yourself who will follow you around and deal damage to whatever you hit with your normal attacks.

Click for animated gif!

On level one you’ll get a single clone which deals 33% of your normal attack damage, and at level two you’ll gain another clone which deals 25% of your damage. The spell type works pretty much like the Cloud Strike spell for now: after you cast it once it reserves part of your mana pool and stays active until you cast it again.

The second spell is an area of effect spell in which your character channel his or her inner power and deal damage to all enemies within a target circle.

Clickety-click!

As you level this skill you’ll notice that the target circle becomes bigger and that you’ll be able to hit the enemies within it an additional number of times.

Next up we hope to finally finish the dungeon, so get ready for some epic boss battle(s)!

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

It’s time again for our weekly recap – this time we have a bunch of random things, as well as some good news:

For a long while now we’ve had some pretty tough time communicating due to us living in 3 very different parts of Sweden. However, as of last week Fred and Teddy has finally moved back to Gotland and are now roomies – something which we really hope will improve the speed and quality of the production.

Their first mission will be to finish the main boss of the dungeon! We’ve been saving it since it needs a lot of fine tuning and screen pointing, which is cumbersome to do online.

As for the work we’ve done this week, here’s a bunch of random stuff:

Here’s the interior of the treestump previously seen in a screenshot of the Fae village. This is where the Elder Fae gather to keep order in the forest and among their kin.

And while we’re on the topic of Elder Fae, we’ve shown you 3 before, representing Winter, Spring and Summer. Here’s the last one, representing autumn:

In the animation department we have an effect which you’ll see in an upcoming mini-boss fight with the mysterious Phaseman:

There’s also this a scary-but-kind-of-cute enemy roaming the snow lands we’ve been working on lately:

Lastly, we present to you the Ice Spike skill, a spell which we actually completed a very long time ago, but which we haven’t included in the beta as of yet. This skill will make ice spikes appear in the direction you’re casting it.

Click on the image to see the animated gif if it doesn’t play automatically:

This week, we’ve been squeezing in some new magic spells into the game! If you’re a returning reader, you’ve probably seen some graphics of a couple of them.

Click the pictures to view them as animated images!

Here’s a Chain Lightning spell, working pretty much in the classic way! It will hit the closest enemy in front of you (and in range), and will then jump to new enemies until the max amount of jumps has been reached, or there are no more enemies to jump to.

Next is a Meteor spell, which has the same targeting system as the Earth Spike. However, unlike the Earth Spike, there’s a slight delay before it hits, so you need to plan ahead. On the plus side, it hits like a truck (that’s crashing down from the sky)!

Lastly, here’s the Plant Summon in action! Unlike the Cloud, you can summon a bunch of these babies, but they are stationary and can’t follow you around. Use them like traps and bait enemies into them!

Meanwhile in Fairyland, more portraits have been raining in! Here’s the Summer Elder, worried that winter will never end:

And here’s a regular Summer Fae, sharing her elder’s discomfort with the sudden cold snap:

As this week’s parting gift, please accept this little animation of a Brawler Bot waking up from a long, long slumber!

This week, we’ll take a first glance at a less dangerous part of the Winterland, a yet to be namned village area!

This place is inhabited by the race of Faes. Despite being about as tall as an apple, they play a pretty major role in the world of Grindea.

Below is a screenshot of the village, as well as a portrait and some sprites of its tiny population.

Staying with the winter stuff, Teddy has been adding a bit more flair to the area by putting together some weather effects. No winter area is complete with a proper snow effect after all!

Click the image to view the animation