This week I’ve been working on some new art for Secrets of Grindea once more!

First up, two new expressions for Zhamla:

I also edited to floor, removing the golden bars to make the battle area look more clean – before and after below:

There’s also an extended background for the final scene in the true ending, where the camera will be able to scroll up past the Collector’s HQ and into the skies above for the credits.

Despite only part of the roof showing in the game, I (thankfully) had been smart enough to make the entire thing when I first made the HQ building, meaning a lot less work compared to having to puzzle together the rooftop as well.

Although this scene is much larger than what will actually be shown in the game engine (the camera is almost half the size of the background above), I still wanted to make a version that show the entire thing, flowers and all. Perhaps we’ll at least be able to use it in the production book?

For the actual game engine, we’ll use this smaller version:

So nice to be able to make some backgrounds again! Definitely looking forward to the next project, where I’ll be able to make a ton more 🙂

I’ve also made some new items: some paw prints for the housing system, an accessory and a new hat!

All of these were made in collaboration with our backers – thank you so much for supporting the game! ❤️

There’s still a few small things to add before I’ve made my final contribution to the game, but either way, it feels so cool to have gotten this far. Soon 1.0! 🙂

Now that the month has drawn to a close, it’s time to do a quick recap of what’s left for this patch, especially what we want to add to frontline (which is out already, by the way!!) and what we’ll save for stable – so it was high time for another meeting!

One of the things we’ve been talking about has been the boss drops. Right now only a few early bosses have boss drops, which aren’t even dropped 100% of the time, which is a bit weird even now that we’ve added boss rebattles in the arena. We had two options for this – either remove the boss drops altogether or let the boss drops be at 100% and add some more to other bosses across the game. In this case, we decided to go with the later, adding a bunch of new boss drops, including a seed allowing you to grow a Power Flower inside your house, an evil eye mask dropped from the evil eye in the ghost ship, a thorn worm cap allowing you to wear thorns on your head, and a cog shield dropped from the toy machine in Seasonne!

The Power Flower Seed brings us to the next topic, which is a plant system where you can plant seeds and have them grow in your home! How this will work is that you’ll find a seed, dropped from various plant enemies, and if you take the seed to the tree in Seasonne he’ll put it in a pot for you, which you can then place in your house. After some time, the seed will turn into a full grown potted version of the enemy you got the seed from. While this completed system won’t make it into this frontline update, we’ll start it up at the very least.

For the stable update, we’ll be adding Penn Wrythe’s novels, which will appear throughout the game in parts. After meeting her in Port Monnaie you’ll get to influence the way the final part of the story turns out, so think about your answers carefully! We’ll also be adding the cellar beneath the church in Port Monnaie, as well as a bunch of old books here and there across the game.

We discussed whether to add the player scaling feature yet or not, but we’ve decided to save that for another update – possibly the one after this one, where we go back to focusing more on Arcade Mode again.

Now, time for some last minute additions, starting with the final arena award, the arena hat:

Adding some backgrounds for Bishop in the journal, as well as a background for your character when they’re in Bishop’s own little realm:

Here’s something that won’t appear in this next patch, but is important to start working on anyway, namely our continued rework of the menu! In this step you’ll see me making a new layout where we’re removing the text titles of each inventory category and replacing them with icons (although the actual icons haven’t been made yet):

And as an additional bonus, a sneak peek of what Maracus Skill-to-Talent transmute looks like, complete with the awesome song made by our amazing music creator Andrew Riley of Lucky Lion Studios! Look at the old man go :3

Since we decided to make a bunch of new boss drops as well, I better get to work making those! Here’s a Power Flower seed, an Evil Eye Mask, and a Thorn Worm cap:

I also went ahead and made the drop appearance of the power flower seed all grown up for its place in the housing system, although you won’t be able to use it just yet (next update, maybe!)

Finally I was a bit cheeky and made my own suggestion for what the Toy Factory’s shield drop could look like, although it’ll most likely be edited and adjusted a bit by Fred:

And finally, here’s a little early sneak peek of three new collectors that will appear in the collector’s HQ or around the world, featuring a few more veterans, since we felt like the collectors all seemed awfully young:

Now go forth dear friends and try out the new patch over on the frontline beta! Among the new stuff is:

* Three big but optional side “quests”/objectives has been added, you can find them in the lost ship, Pillar Mountains and Mt Bloom respectively

* You can now refight all bosses in the arena, which has been improved in terms of UI and has a few more challenges as well

* A new load screen and splash screen for everyone who has been working on the game; the game should also load more quickly

* More bosses have drops (if you’ve killed them already you have been awarded the drops retroactively as all boss drops are now at 100%)

* Talent orbs can now be transformed into silver skill points and the other way around in the HQ

You can read the full patch notes over at the forums! And as always, all feedback is appreciated, please continue to help us make this game the best it can be, we value each and every one of your comments <3

Now, with this patch out and about, we’ll be taking a little belated easter holiday, since we haven’t had any off time for a while! The blog will be back as usual on April 26th, after we’ve had a full week back at the office with new content to recap for you guys :)

Finally(!) we are happy to announce that Stable has received the long awaited update, introducing Tai Ming in its entirety to those of you who haven’t opted into the frontline updates! A quick rundown of what to expect in this patch can be found here.

Naturally, since we’ve spent most of our time last week preparing for the update, those of you who have played it might have already seen the following things. For some new housing items and a design question we’d like your input on, scroll to the bottom of this post!

First up though: when we talked about adding new items to the shops, we totally forgot about one pretty important store: the hat salesman! Because of this I went ahead and made a bunch of random hats for him:

We hadn’t really discussed exactly what hats would be available in this store, so it’s possible we’ll move things around and have some (or all?) of these somewhere else before the game is done. There are a bunch of hats available that haven’t been placed somewhere in the game yet, so if we feel any of them fit better we’ll just swap them out. In either case, there can never be too many hats, right?

Next up, the final Merchant Isles visitor to join the group in Tai Ming:

This guy has traveled far in hopes of selling things in Tai Ming, however since he won’t be let into the town itself (several years waiting time and all that), he’ll have to settle for something else…

As we draw close to releasing the stable version of Tai Ming, there’s – as usual – a bunch of tiny fixes needed as well.

First up: as you might remember, we talked about whether you’d be able to move a puzzle block to solve a puzzle in the middle of the Mimic battle. After our first discussion, we said it’d be possible to solve it mid-battle, but later on we changed our mind. For reference, here’s the final stage of the boss room, the way it looked before:

And here’s our solution: a bunch of wood that blocks the solution, so you can’t solve it while the battle is raging:

Instead, you’ll have to wait until after the battle, where some of the fire the Mimic spits out cause the wood on the map to burn:

Next, there were some sprites missing for the weapons in the area, which are now properly added, both in their proper animated form and as menu sprites:

Third, we decided to give that newly added Merchant Isles Merchant a couple expressions where he’s a bit bothered by the fact he is not allowed to sell his wares inside Tai Ming:

And finally, we decided that each of these Tai Ming housing paintings will be their own object, purchased separately, and so I made miniatures for them as well:

And now, time for a bigger batch of Tai Ming housing item miniatures!

These are the wall decor items, and there’s quite a few of them as you can see! I’m not sure if these will all be unlocked as part of the Tai Ming batch yet, or if we’ll move things around a bit to even it out between the batches. The three rectangular paintings to the lower right only have one display miniature for now, since I wasn’t sure if they were going to be objects of their own or various styles/skins of the same item:

And finally, something we’d like to ask our players regarding the Tai Ming floors of Arcade Mode!

The Tai Ming Arcade floors poses an interesting challenge that none of the other floors do. After all, Tai Ming is a town, and a town you can explore both in the past and present, so how do we properly convey that over a set of not-overly-decorated rooms where you battle a ton of monsters?

The first thing we decided was that there would have to be enemies in both past and present state rooms: we definitely want to include the time travel aspect in some way, and keeping the past rooms enemy-free (as they are in Story Mode) just isn’t an option.

As for the layout of the floors, we have two options.

Option #1 is to have the Tai Ming floors be about half as long as a regular Arcade Mode floor. That means there will be half the amount of rooms, and your goal is to find a specific room which contains a time rift that allows you to travel forward in time, passing through the rooms once more in another time!

For example, say you begin in past. You battle your way through a set of different rooms, all decorated in Tai Ming’s past style with cherry trees, statues and whatnot. Then you reach a big room, which is empty. This is the boss room, but you’re not yet able to battle the boss because you’re in the wrong time. You go back and find another room containing a time rift which you pass through. Now on your mini map the empty room gets the boss icon, and you start making your way back there.

Now that you’re in a different time, all of the rooms have transformed into Tai Ming’s present state instead, with the statues broken and cherry trees bare. In each room you pass, new enemies will spawn: you essentially battle your way from the portal room back to the boss room you found before. Once you reach the boss room again, you can finally battle the boss and get to the next floor.

There will of course be cases where you find the time rift before you reach the boss room, and in those cases the floor will be shorter than normal, since you don’t have to backtrack through as many rooms.

The upside to this version is that you’ll get to see each room you already went through in its past and present state, and that it makes these floors a bit more unique compared to the other floors of Arcade Mode. The downside is the backtracking, which might not feel as interesting as going through a unique set of rooms, and the fact that you have to find a specific room (the rift room) before you can progress through the floor as usual, which might feel annoying to some people.

Option #2 is a bit more straight forward. This idea is simply that certain rooms have a time rift you pass through as you go between one room and another, so some rooms will be past and some will be present. This means the floor will be the same length as and work in the same way as the other Arcade floors (when you find the boss room, it will always be in the correct timeline and you can battle the boss at once). What rooms will appear and whether they are past or present rooms will be randomly generated by the map rather than you going through a set of past rooms first, which then transform into present rooms.

Perhaps not as interesting mechanically, but might be more so visually (more unique rooms rather than two versions of the same, shorter floor).

———————–

Since we can’t really decide which one we prefer, we’d like to hear what you guys think. Would you prefer Option #1 or Option #2? This game is designed to be enjoyed by our players, so we’re very interested to hear which one of these you’d like to see!

In order to collect your votes, I have made a topic with a poll on our forums! Please cast your vote in THIS THREAD to let us know what you prefer. Thank you :D

A new week, in which we continue to work on the Mount Bloom side quests!

There are new doors, leading deeper into the caves, where two very different challenges appear…

The first one, as you know, is the Phase Puzzle challenge. Last week we decided to change the graphics of the Spark puzzle a bit, having the barrels move on rails instead of floating in the air (to make it less abstract and easier to spot when the rails are covered in electricity that will throw you out of the barrel):

The second challenge will involve this new crystal type:

(The crystals will be randomly generated by the game engine, so it only looks as if it’s the same one in this Photoshop screenshot. Also, the lower walls will appear above everything in the game, so ignore any overlaps you spot!)

In this challenge you have to get past a large number of these heavier crystals, which don’t easily break when you hit them. In fact, it takes a long long time to get them out of the way – and it’s time you don’t have. You see, the corridor where you’ll find these heavier crystals is filled with poisonous gas! How will you ever get through to the other side?!

This Caveling, called Chix, is a new character which has a very important quest for you:

You see, it seems he has lost his pet inside the cave system, and he really wants his dear old pal to find its way back to him. Can you help him find it?

Of course, you can’t have side quests and challenges without proper rewards. One of which (spoiler alert) will be a gas mask! Since Vilya has a tradition of uploading videos featuring 4 hats, she threw together 3 more which we don’t know exactly where they will appear yet:

(In the end, we decided to go for dark eyes for the gas mask, so after the video was finished we changed it into this:)

While we’re close to finishing up these side quests (we only have very minor things left), unfortunately Teddy is leaving for Stockholm in a few days, which means he’ll be unable to patch until he gets back home (his laptop messes up the game font when compiling). However, he’ll still work from there, so while we’re not hitting upload on this patch just yet, we’ll continue to work on the next temple until he’s back and ready to patch from a safe computer :)

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:

As you may already know, the festival patch is finally live, and if you haven’t checked it out already, you definitely should go do so in the Frontline Beta! :D

We also released the Original Soundtrack a few days ago, since a lot of you were asking for it! It currently contains 31 songs from Story Mode + 6 Arcade Mode Remixes, and will be updated as new songs get added to the game :)

Here’s the link to the OST on Steam!

Since a new patch often means new bugs, Teddy has been on bug hunting duty while Fred & Vilya moved on to do other things!

For Vilya, that meant doing a whole lot of different tasks, including creating a new portrait and a bunch of new hats:

Fred, meanwhile, has started animating some of the new enemies you’ll be facing in the next area: Mt.Bloom! As they’re still WIP at this stage, though, here’s a mix of some of the cleaned up animations from the flashback cutscene:

Right now, Teddy is busy prototyping the next boss fight, which we’ll hopefully be able to show some stuff from in next week’s recap! For now, here’s another sneak peek of who you’ll be facing:

This week Teddy spent finishing up the translation tool (finally!), which should go live in a few days! He’s now looking into starting up that cutscene business for real, just as Fred has finished his part of that job, giving him a ton of sketched out animations to work with.

Now, instead of cutscene things, Fred is working on a new mini-boss that you’ll have to face soon after the cutscene ends:

Yes, it’s a Queen Bee!! :D Do you feel the horror?!

Vilya, meanwhile, has been all over the place, starting off by creating an interface for Mold Essence in Arcade Mode, which allows you to turn essence into visual upgrades & housing items (among other things):

She then moved back to the time travel area, creating hats, masks, drops and portraits to fill the area with life & loot:

And that’s all for this week! Next up will be prototyping the cutscene, bug fixing the translation tool, and preparing Evergrind City for the next installment of the main story :)

Two weeks ago, we showed a bunch of new menu icons. This week, Vilya continues to rework the menu graphics! First up, we have new menu titles, adding a touch of color to the otherwise very brown menu:

Second, we reworked the skill boxes a bit:

With this new look, we hope to tie the appearance of the Skill-tabs together with the Talent counterpart. Also, more graphics & colors, yay!

We’ve also begun reworking the character box, again removing some brown (in the current version, it’s floating in a brown box) and having it stand on its own:

We’ll continue working on this left side of the menu later, literally tying things together a bit more visually, so it’s not just three boxes floating next to eachother!

Now, for something that’s actually already in the game… As of the latest update, we now have actual Steam Achiements! And with some of these achievements, we’ve added new rewards for your character.

Below you can see a selection of these rewards (go get ’em now!):

Lastly, we’re currently thinking of ways to implement the new promo art in our website background. Here’s a mockup of what it could like, though we’re not quite there yet:

This week has been fraught with biological interference! Teddy had begun bringing the Seasonne floors into the Arcade Mode properly, including making elite versions of all enemies, “traps” and some floor specific challenges. Sadly, his work got rather ham stringed by a seasonal thing known as the “winter vomiting bug”. We’ll leave the details of that to your imagination!

Incidentally, Vilya got hit with some severe toothache towards the end of the week, but still managed to put out some good stuff before getting incapacitated by lack of sleep. She’s been getting a bit too much sand in her eyes over the past weeks, so she decided to take a break from desert building by becoming a mad hatter!

Those of you who’ve played through the latest content has probably noticed a certain aspect of it that’s fairly lackluster, namely the sound effects!

While it’s pretty cool that everything in the entire dungeon either sounds like a slime getting hit or have no sound at all, that’s not how it’s supposed to be. To rectify this, Fred has been working on making video guides for our dear sound designers, which means we should have the assets we need to make the aural experience complete Soon™!

Lastly, we’d like to do a little shout out for the people over at Radical Fish Games, not only for their radical studio name, but also because they’ve set up a crowd funding campaign for their super cool ARPG project Cross Code! Check out their IndieGoGo-page, where you can find a free demo (playable in the web browser with help of black magic), and see if it’s something for you!

This week we decided to backtrack and polish parts of the story mode in preparation for a future demo! Our main focus has been to tweak smaller things here and there as well as fixing bugs, but we’ve also been adding some new features such as these long awaited style slots:

The idea behind the style slots is to allow players to show off the gear they think look good without sacrificing combat potential. In the screenshot above, I felt the Bandana and Glasses had better stats, but I preferred the visual appearance of my Straw Boater and Blindfold. Style slots give players the best of both worlds!

There’s also a bunch of weapons being added, with a focus on two-handed weapons as they’ve been heavily underrepresented as of late. Below is a simpler version of the Axe from last week, as well as a Spiked Club and the wicked Slime Hammer:

Lastly, we’ve been making a bunch of new items to balance what you can buy in the stores. Here’s a sneak peek of a couple of hats and facegear which you’ll be able to equip in the near future:

Now it’s back business! See you next week :)