First of all, thanks a lot for your comments on last week’s blog post! Most people seem to agree that Easy Mode isn’t needed, so that’s how we’ll keep it until it seems that opinion have changed :)

This week we’ve once more, in the spirit of having shorter design meetings but scheduling them more often, had another set of discussion regarding upcoming Grindea stuff! This time we’ve mainly focused on the next dungeon (!) and the bow.

The Fourth Dungeon
So, we’ve talked a lot about this back and forth over the years. We do know we want it to be ghost/undead themed, but it’s been hard to decide on a setting, and we’ve gone from wanting it to be a ghost ship, to a ghost ship + an island, to a shrine on an island, and back to just a single ghost ship. After today’s meeting I’m fairly certain the 4th dungeon will indeed be a ghost ship, where your goal is to move from the bottom of the ship to the deck where the final artifact awaits you.

So far, in our very basic design, there will be a big floor at the bottom, which will be used as the ship’s storage area and where you’ll move through a set of rooms solving various obstacles until you get the skill used in this dungeon: an item that allows you to see into the spirit world. Some of the enemies and other.. things.. on this ship can only be seen & interacted with when using this skill. That means there might be flying swords coming after you that you can do nothing about until you have the skill that allows you to see the actual enemies!

The following two floors will consist a main corridor, which you’re supposed to get through. Only there’s obstacles in the way forcing you into other doors in hopes of finding a way around the obstacles, finding enemies and challenges on the way.

The ghost ship will probably be around the size of Temple of Seasons (that’s what we aim for, at least), and the main focus of the dungeon will be to use the dungeon skill to solve various puzzles and obstacles.

The Bow
We also talked a bit about the bow, since it’s something we haven’t touched upon a lot since it was implemented a hundred years ago! We agreed that we want to add more upgrades for the bow in general -even bigger quivers, more damage, etc, but we’re also looking into adding a bunch of talents for it (we want to add a ton of talents for basically everything, haha).

We’re also thinking of adding a NPC somewhere that can modify your bow into a fire or ice bow (there might be more options as we come up with them). With the fire bow, your arrows have a chance to burn on enemies, and the ice bow has a chance to make them cold. I’m guessing this NPC would be found in the later stages of the game, perhaps in the upcoming desert town. Either that or modifying your bow will be expensive enough for most people to save up for it for a while. But nothing about that is set in stone yet – gotta finish Tai Ming first :)

Speaking of Tai Ming, we’re of course continuing to work on the final part. This week I began working the second to last map for Tai Ming: The Courtyard!

After this there’s actually only the final Boss Room (which will have a couple of variations, so it’s still a bit of work left before I’m ready to completely leave Tai Ming behind)… What a journey!

For this background, let’s start with the basic sketch:

The circle in the middle are my indications of where you need to be able to battle stuff, hence there shouldn’t be a lot of stuff in the way around there. Otherwise we have a huge altar of sorts, and some greenery…

Progress:

And the final image below! You may notice the door from my sketch (on the altar) is missing. Actually you probably didn’t notice since it wasn’t very clear it was a door…. BUT in any case, there will, indeed be a door there in the future (I hadn’t made it at the point of taking the screencap below…):

A somewhat related thing we’ve been working on recently is creating a suitable effect for an upcoming battle! In this recap, I thought it’d be fun to take a look at our iteration progress as we implement and improve upon an idea.

So, this battle takes place in that courtyard above, and in the beginning, we had a vague idea of the battle area being surrounded by a circle of flames. Once the background was ready, Teddy went ahead and made a quick prototype of what that circle could look like:

While it certainly gives some kind of effect, it also felt a bit underwhelming. While discussing our options, we thought about making the trees and bushes burn, using another color flame and using different sizes for the flame particles, among other things, but nothing really felt spot on.

During our talk it also turned out some of us had imagined the flame circle differently. And so we went on to prototype another idea, where the fire would cover everything not inside the battle area.

Cue another screenshot:

Now this felt a bit more epic, but it still felt like it missed something. So I decided to take the above screenshot into Photoshop and started painting on top of it, creating a mockup of what I thought would be a cool effect for the battle:

After showing it to the others, Teddy used my mockup as a base and created a third prototype, this time featuring the illustrated effects:

After seeing this in action, we all pretty much agree this is a much better direction than the first basic flame circle. And we’re still gonna add/edit a bunch of stuff! For one, the graphics are all prototype here, the sparks in the air and the flame particles will be different in the final version. We’ll also the add the burning trees and greenery we talked about after seeing the first prototype, and I’ll edit the ground to look more burnt around the flames.

Now, we could have chosen to look at the fire circle in the first screenshot and say “this is OK, let’s keep it”. Instead, we kept pushing to make the scene better and more epic. Would it have saved us a lot of time to just stick with the original idea? Yes. Would the fight be as epic in the end? No.

And this is why it’s so hard for us to estimate how long things will take! Sometimes our first try is good enough, but often we have to spend a lot of time prototyping different options and change stuff before we get something we’re truly satisfied with. Is it worth it in the end? Well, I certainly believe it is and I hope you guys agree! :)

….And now for something different.

After some further discussing of the Housing and it’s ‘batch’ system (where you unlock a batch of x items in the furniture shop every time you enter a new area), we made a list of base items that should be included in each batch!

There will be a bunch of additional, random items as well, but we thought it would be good to have a common base for each batch. The items available in each batch will be:

1x Floortile
1x Wallpaper
1x Bed
1x Nightstand
2x Tables (one square and one rectangular)
2x Seats (one 1×1 tiled and one 1×2-1×3)
1x Window

And so, I went ahead and added a bunch of basic items for the two batches I already started working on (more special items to come):

My dream for the Flying Fortress window above is that it’ll have tiny clouds floating by, but I haven’t confirmed 100% it’ll actually happen yet. If it ends up being too time consuming to implement we’ll come up with something else (or make a loopable animation of it perhaps).

The above set will unlock when you enter Pumpkin Woods. Some of you might wish for a more extreme Halloween theme with scary ghosts and creepy stuff, but don’t worry! Those needs should be satisfied with another upcoming batch for.. another area… :3

Finally, because tradition, have a sneak peek at what Fred’s working on right now – the second stage of the Mimic battle! Yes, it’s growing…

Happy New Year (and we’re back)!! Have you had a nice holiday? We took about a week off to recharge our batteries, but as of last week we’ve all returned to the office to get back to work.

Remember before christmas, when I (Vilya) started working on the final room of Tai Ming’s third zone? Well, over Christmas I went ahead and finished it!

One big focus of this room is the shelf doors! Since the shelves will hold a bunch of different items, many of which aren’t books, I thought it would be cool to add doors and make them look a bit cooler. Plus, variations and all. So I made four different sets of doors: two types of glass doors (one long and one short) plus two types of wooden doors (one long and one short).

In the end the smaller wooden door didn’t get used, but who knows, maybe it’ll turn up in the future somewhere!

After creating the doors, I began adding a bunch of random props, some which have been used before in various places, as well as some edited stuff:

Next up, painting a bunch of unique props to spice things up a bit:

Some of these items are inspired by various items from other media. Can you figure out which ones and what they have been inspired by? :D

Finally, here’s the finished past version of this room! Whew:

Now, all great things must come to an end (or so they say), and that includes fancy storage room! Forgotten by all, it has decayed and turned into a mess. Main part of turning this room from past to present state involved creating a ton of holes in the carpets. I also threw some random trash on the ground to make the room feel more messy:

In the end, here’s the rather bleak main version of this room (you’ll actually only spot the past version through a flashback orb):

Now, before Christmas break we had some majord design talks which I may have mentioned in a previous thread. One thing we talked a lot about was Arcade Mode. And there’s some pretty huge changes coming…!

There’s no secret we want to add a bunch of new room types and challenges to Arcade Mode. We have a ton of ideas and it’s likely we’ll begin implementing some of them once we’re done with Tai Ming. However, there are more radical changes coming (though I’m not sure how soon)!

First up, the town will get a lot bigger with many new kinds of special buildings, and you’ll be able to choose which ones will appear first as opposed to the way things are now, where the town slowly updates depending on your total score. This will likely be handled by putting up a bunch of indicators for what will appear where on the map (like signs or character explaining what will appear if you if you ‘choose’ that one in particular).

We’re also reworking how you gain Essence! We’d like to reward everyone more evenly/steadily rather than giving almost no Essence to some and a TON of it to others, depending on how well you do on a run. So if you’re one of those who don’t typically get a lot of essence, you’ll likely get more, and if you tend to get more essence than you can handle, you’ll probably get less.

There MIGHT also be another currency, or rather a rework of an old one: gold! If we implement this, you’ll keep any gold you get on your run + a bonus at the end of each run depending on how things go or how far you get (kind of the way essence works now, but gold won’t be as important so we’re more OK with the pro’s getting more of it). The gold would then be used to unlock the hats and similar items previously exchanged for Essence by the Bishop (he will keep trading perks for essence, but his other shop functions will be moved to one or several other unlockable shops which use gold), as well as other new features.

So basically, Essence is used to unlock perks and town features where you can spend your gold (if the gold part gets implemented)! Whether gold gets added or not kind of depends on whether we feel there are enough cool things to spend your gold on, or if we’d prefer to keep most of it free of charge and use Essence for the rest.

——–

Typically this is where we’d have a bunch of Fred’s animations, but since he’s still working on some upcoming and very spoilerific cutscenes and fights… We’ll keep those to ourselves for a while yet. Hang in there! ;)

Hey guys, Vilya here! This week it’s time for us Swedes to celebrate christmas!

Teddy is already back at his hometown catching up with friends and family and Fred will leave later this week, so it’s time for a little break to recharge our batteries. Before that though, there’s one more weekly recap!

Since we live on the island where our gamedev education was held, every year there’s a couple of fun events for us alumni to attend. Last week was one of them: the Alumni Days!

The Alumni Days consist of 2-3 days where people who graduated come back to school to hold lectures on what it’s like out there ‘in the industry’, answer questions at a panel, plus attend some parties and dinner(s)!

This year was an absolute blast, and there were a lot of great lectures, all of which will eventually be uploaded on this YouTube channel (some are already there). Go check it out if you’re an aspiring dev – there’s already a ton of lectures from previous years too :)

This year’s edition went on from Thursday to Saturday, so there were three days of lectures and hanging out with other devs from our old class (among others)! While living on this isolated island can be quite trying sometimes (everything else is sooo far away), it’s great to be able to meet up with everyone like this and get inspired by other developers.

And now, the present version of the room from last week! Time to break some stuff :3

As with the previous battle room, I added a bunch of random stuff to the floor to make it look more interesting. The pure water has become a sickly green, and the tree has turned a more sinister shade (if there is such a thing as a sinister shade)… :)

Next, time to start working on the final room of the shrine in Tai Ming’s third zone! And it’s quite a large one…

So, this room is a kind of storage/library room where a lot of artifact and treasures will be housed. Because painting all these items will take a lot of time, I decided to split this post in 2-4 parts (depending on how much stuff I end up recording/creating GIFs of).

In this first part, it’s all about the basic stuff, creating the backbone of the room: floors, walls, bookcases/shelves that will contain the items. In the next 1-2 parts I’ll be making a bunch of GIFs of the items and shelf-doors, etc, being added! And of course, after that we need to make a present version of the room as well :)

After step 1, here’s what we got:

Some of you might remember Professor Pine, the guys behind the “diary entries” of Flying Fortress? Well, time to meet the guy!

Actually, you won’t exactly meet him… But you WILL watch him do some talking many years ago, through a flashback orb! What could he be doing in Tai Ming?

With my parts of Tai Ming almost being finished, it’s time to start looking ahead and think about what’s coming next. First up, we’re gonna update Arcade Mode, adding the Mt. Bloom and Tai Ming floors (and after that likely spend some time adding bonus things – Housing for example). Once I complete the final things for Tai Ming (the final room + cards) that means I’ll be focusing on Arcade Mode backgrounds and a TON of furniture, which will be a lot of fun!

After that, it’s finally time to start with the next area… I’ve already completed most of the art for the desert, which is supposed to come after Tai Ming, so for me that means I’ll begin playing around with the harbor town that comes after it. Then there’s only two temples/dungeons left! I can’t believe we’ve actually come this far, haha. Though it’s been 5 years already it feels like we began working on Grindea yesterday. Time flies when you have fun, and working on this game has definitely been a blast from the start!

Definitely looking forward to another year of fun gamedev, and I hope you’ll all stay with us through our journey! After all, without you guys there would be no game. So thank you for the support, and I hope you have a happy holiday/merry christmas/just a wonderful time :D

See you next year!!

This week we uploaded another patch to the frontline beta, featuring a bunch of smaller updates! The biggest changes, from the patch notes:

World Map Completion: Based on a suggestion on our forums, we’ve added completion tracking for the World Map! It tells you how many cards, drops, fishes, quests and secrets you have yet to find in any given area. This should help people figure out what it is they’re missing for that juicy 100 % completion! Note that the Achievements and Crafting completion is still tracked via their own menus.

Damage Numbers: The new default setting for displaying damage numbers is “Composite”, which turns your damage into one big number per enemy instead of many small numbers. We did this change mainly because some builds dish out so many hits that the old damage numbers cluttered everything, and in multiplayer this happened pretty much regardless of builds. It also makes damage over time a bit more readable, as well as how much damage a flamethrower or blade flurry cast actually does in the end! For people unhappy with this change, there’s a “Classic” option that mimics the old style, as well as an even more streamlined option called “Minimalistic”, and of course… an option to turn off damage numbers completely!

HP Bars: Enemies now have HP bars above their heads by default. These appear after an enemy has taken damage, and fade away after a while if no new damage is taken! Also, low HP allies in multiplayer also have their HP displayed above their heads. Both of these types of HP bars can be disabled, or set to always appear if an enemy or player is below full HP.

There’s also the accessory shop, among other things (which we already began preparing in last week’s post), and a bunch of new characters!

Joining his sister in the store will be this young fellow! Yes, it’s a guy, you know the drill, Vilya can’t draw guys… though I think they do look a bit manlier now…maybe (ignoring the braids)??

Anyway! Being the heir to their father’s business, he’s sick and tired of the boring stuff and would like nothing more than to become a collector. Perhaps there’s some way you can help him? We actually haven’t decided on any quests surrounding this family but it would be pretty cool :)

There’s also the father of the accessory store’s shop keeper and her brother! This is one famous merchant, visiting to check up on his daughter who has moved abroad to open up a shop of her own:

As mentioned before, he’d like nothing more than for one of his children to take over his business, but with the daughter setting up a store of her own and his son’s lacking interest… Whatever will become of it?!

Now, remember the person entertaining a bunch of artifacts in the first part of Tai Ming?

Well, they’re back! Only this time in the second zone! Some of the artifacts have been replaced, and this Helmet appears instead!

Not much is currently known about Helmet, but I’m quite sure Teddy has come up with some awesome dialogue for this guy (or girl). I mean, life has to be kind of cool as a helmet, right?

…Right?

Now, as always before a patch, there’s a bunch of smaller things to be edited or fixed!

First up, the accessory-siblings. We adjusted the skin tone of the brother slightly to make him fit in better with the rest of his family, and changed the hair color of the shop owner girl for the same reason:

We also played around with the Accessory shop title, which previously was called “Accessory & Co” but is “Ruby’s Rubies”. Our current favorite (and the one who made it to the patch) is the middle one:

Next up, we wanted the Accessory shop to stand out a bit more, so I was tasked with changing its colors! Below is the previous version as well as two color alternatives for the shop. We’ll probably go for the standard wall color, though in the future I might go back and edit the houses in Evergrind City in general.. Who knows what colors the walls will end up having then?

Before:

After, version 1 and version 2:

The ruins in the west needed their own title to appear as you enter the area as well as a name! We settled for Ancient Ruins for now, subject to change if we come up with something else… :)

Some of you noticed the chest closing in the present after you opened it and the water is low. Fear not, it has been solved – the chest will now remain open. Though where did the plants go? :o

Then, since a flashback scene with Mana and the children (Zhamla and Tessen) has been added, so I got to make a bunch of new expressions for our favorite nanny! :)

Finally……. Back to the third Tai Ming map and that old shrine!!

Aside from being a place to battle enemies in the present, this room will also hold another flashback orb, with the people of Tai Ming enlisting the help of the Flying Fortress crew to deal with a certain threat.

Since I don’t know exactly how much of the room will be shown in the flashback orb yet, I’m keeping the past version quite bare for now. I’ll probably add more decorations once I know where and how the cutscene will play out :)

Next week we’ll continue working on the third part of Tai Ming, and since the holidays are coming up and we’ll spend some time apart we’ve begun having more design meeting so everyone knows what’s coming next in the game! For those cases when we want to work but can’t get a hold of the others to ask questions, you know. Therefore, I expect the next two posts (or so) will contain more design talk and mentions of upcoming features…. But we’ll see :)

This week we continue to prepare things for a mini-patch adding the new features we talked about last week (new damage numbers etc)!

Remember the Accessory shop from the last recap? Well, someone has to run it! Time for another portrait~

This girl comes from the Merchant Isles and has moved to Evergrind City to open her Accessory shop! Her father and brother will be visiting as well, checking out her new business, so they will be upcoming portraits later on :)

Last week I also mentioned adding some stuff to the world map. A big thanks to Own who came up with the great idea in this thread :)

So, for a long time now we’ve wanted to add some things to the world map in order to give more clarity for people wishing to 100% the game and as a general incentive to explore each area a bit more thoroughly (if you see how many secrets you have left you feel more inclined to find the rest, right?)

So anyway! We have two sets of additions. First, a bunch of icons on the left side, indicating (in order) Enemy drops, Cards, Quests, Fishes and Secrets. Next to these icons will be a counter showing how many you’ve got vs how many there are (for example 06/10). These numbers are map specific and will change depending on which part of the map you’re hovering over.

The second part is the pet and map counter in the lower right corner of the map, indicating how many pets and maps you’ve found vs hos many there are. These are global and will show the same number regardless of which area you’ve currently selected.

We also plan on adding a percentage next to each area name, so in the case above, it would say “Evergrind City 48%” indicating I have achieved 48% completion of said area. As some things get added in patches or you unlock new quests as you progress through the story, it will be possible to get 100% on one area, only to have it revert back to say 70% as new content gets unlocked. When this happens you’ll get a notice letting you know your map has been updated, and there will be a “New” sign above each part of the map with new stuff to do/find :)

Now, with the world map expanding and new areas being added, it’s time to rebuild and add to the world map :D

First of all, it’s time to rebuild some of the puzzle pieces that make up the world map. These will be changed further as we go along and add the desert map & the maps past it. But first things first! This time, it’s the upper left corner that has been adjusted.

Before:

After:

Next, time to take a look at what happens beneath those puzzle pieces… Previously, we hadn’t added the ancient ruins above the western Evergrind fields, so there was no need to include it on the world map. Now that it’s been implemented, no more excuses!

We also expanded the size of the winter area a bit in the process, filling out some empty spaces and making sure the ruins don’t look too big compared to their size in the game.

Before:

After:

But what about Tai Ming, you ask? Of course, the old town needs some kind of indicator as well! We’ve solved that by adding a speech bubble indicating the city’s past or present state (depending on how far along the story you are) once you enter the town for the first time:

Finally, I made the stars which will indicate when you’ve achieved 100% completion of an area. I thought my 200+ hour character Masken who I use to bug test things would have a ton of these stars, but turns around I’m a terrible Collector – no stars for me :(

How many will you get once this gets uploaded to the beta? :D

Finally, a brief return to the third Tai Ming zone! The exit/meeting room in it’s present state:

It’s always fun painting broken glass and vases, so I got to have some fun with this! Also had to split the table in two, so the flashback orb can be placed in the middle, showing everyone around the table!

Also, no enemies in this room so no problem having a bunch of props lying around :)

Hello guys!! This weekly recap will be a little different, to say the least! I (Vilya) had to go home to my hometown for a funeral last week, so I haven’t prepared anything to show on the blog. But rest easy, things have kept moving on in the Pixel Ferrets office anyway!

While Fred continues to prepare a ton of cutscene animations for the third zone, Teddy has set his sight on fixing and adding a bunch of things we’ve wanted to include in the game for quite a long time!

First up, and perhaps most importantly – new damage numbers! We’ve totally revamped the way these work. Take a look below for the old version:

And now, the new version:

So a bunch of things have happened here! First up, there will be tiny numbers showing how much damage you make with each hit, and a big number showing how much damage you’ve done in total within a limited amount of time! So long as you continuously damage an enemy this number will continue to increase. When you crit, the damage text flashes and there are pretty stars flying about! We also have plans to have the damage number increase in size the longer/bigger your combo is, and add some smaller stars to the crit-effect as well. But all in good time…

Another thing you might notice in the above GIF is – yes – Health bars above the enemies! Wohoo! I’m personally very happy about this update, as it makes hitting enemies much more satisfying when you can see their hp dwindle. True, you could do so before by checking the lower right corner, but it’s just not as effective (at least, I kept taking damage while doing that) or as satisfying. The health bar will appear once you hit an enemy and disappears after a while after you quit dealing damage to it.

And YES, this means health bars in Multiplayer will be a thing! You’ll be able to see the health bar of your friends when they go under a certain amount of HP, so now you’ll know who really deserved that health orb, and who was the petty thief!

Teddy also added The Western Ruins to the game, so there’s one more “Sorry this area ain’t implemented yet” notice gone. You can’t actually do anything here yet, except look at the scenery and battle a few slimes, but hey! At least it’s not an annoying invisible wall:

Also, we’ve finally added the Buy Back feature, which we’ve talked about for a loooong time. Shady Merchant is now officially your go-to guy for buying back anything you’ve sold in the game, and the Accessory Shop has moved into a building of its own:

Ok, ok. One more thing. In order to make it clearer when a quest has been updated, we’re adding this new feature:

This is still an early work in progress, but the idea is that whenever a quest gets updated in some way, you’ll get a notice saying ‘Update’ above your head, after which the corresponding quest window will flash in the upper right corner. If you’re currently tracking another quest, it’ll fade back to that one after some time, and if you don’t track any quest at all it’ll simply fade away. This is all to make it a bit easier knowing when you’ve done something that change the objectives of a quest, or if you’re tracking another quest and ‘accidentally’ make progress in another, so you know what’s going on.

We also plan on doing a ton of improvements on the in-game map before Fred is fully done with all the animations needed to implement the scenes in Tai Ming’s third zone! There will be a ton of helpful trackers there, showing you exactly how much you’ve got left to do before achieving 100% on each area. But that’s for another post!

Before saying bye-bye today, here’s one of the few non-spoiler animations Fred is able to show you guys. Behold, a bunch of praying priests:

Stay tuned! :)

Time to move into the sacred shrine! What could be hidden in here?

The first room is planned to be a room where you’ll do some fighting and… well, not much else really! Now, we haven’t even planned on adding a flashback orb to this place, which means that technically, this room will only be viewed in the present (there will be no time rifts in this third part of Tai Ming).

Because of this, I could have chosen to jump into doing the old and ruined stuff from the beginning, and completely skipped this step of making a past version. However, because we’re known to change our minds a lot, and since it’s a lot easier to start from something whole and ruin it after, than to start with something broken and paint it whole, I decided to make this version anyway!

Below is the finished result! Again, it’s possible you won’t even get to see this in the game, so I guess you could see it as a true behind-the-scenes treat ;)

Next up, making the ruined version, which might even show up in the game!!

As usual, this is typically a matter of dulling down color and painting a bunch of cracks and holes in everything.

For this room, I also added a bunch of thrash in the corner which may serve as a spawning point for monkeys when you fight (it looks much better if they appear from behind somewhere, rather than just fade into existence)!

Since you’ll mainly be fighting in here, there’s not a lot of stuff on the floor (as usual). In the end the room will hopefully look lively enough one there’s a bunch of enemies roaming about!

From the first to the last room: time to take a look at the Shrine’s exit/meeting room…

In this room, there will be a quite important flashback orb, showing you the priests trying to deal with certain horrible things that have happened in Tai Ming since your last time jump!

They will be in meeting by this long table, discussing… Things ;) There’s also a scheduled guest appearance of an Arcade Mode character! Can you guess who?

Now, we’ve also been making some slight changes and improvements that will be added to the second zone in a later update!

First up, the crown of Zhamla! In the first version, which we decided to change a little. It’s still the same crown, but he wears it differently, in a way we thought felt ‘cooler’, basically. The old version is on the left, the new is on the right:

We also made a chewing/munching portrait for the girl who eats noodles in the inn! Honestly I’m not sure this portrait will actually appear in the game (we kind of made it for fun), but we’ll see:

Next, we added some more decorations around the entrance to Puzzle World, indicating that something is being built here. It still looked a little bare with just the sign:

Finally, just some slight extra decoration of the first Puzzle World room, in the shape of a half-installed button and a hammer:

Those of you who have tried the new Tai Ming areas on Frontline have probably noticed a bunch of sound effects missing…

And that’s because we haven’t ordered them yet! So, the other day we decided to make a big list of all the sound effects we could possibly want, by playing the areas and writing down any sound effects that seemed to be missing.

After that, we went through the list and decided whether:

A) We should request a new sound effect
B) We already have a sound effect that could fit
C) It doesn’t really need a sound effect after all

To make the list easier to read, we color coded the sound effects, as you can see here:

Red means we felt a sound effect was unnecessary, Orange means we’ll use a previously made sound, and Blue means we’ll ask for a new sound effect.

While we want to have a lot of sound effects in the game to make everything feel alive, sometimes it can get a little too much. Such as in the inn, where we at first had a ‘eating noodles’-sound, a ‘drinking’-sound, some ambience, and a ‘sighing’-sound (for Faita). Playing all of those would likely make the inn a bit too noisy, so we decided against requesting all of them.

As we continue working on the third part of Tai Ming we definitely look forward to adding these sound effects! It’s gonna make a huge difference to actually hear things as they happen, and we’re very happy to work with amazing people who help us bring the world of Grindea to life through sound effects and music! A very important aspect of gamedev that should not be forgotten :)

Hello guys, Vilya here! The first week since the second part of Tai Ming was uploaded to Frontline has now gone past, and we’ve spent eagerly listening to your feedback (and fixing bugs)! Thank you to everyone who left comments and suggestions, we’ll add and improve a bunch of things before we consider this part properly done.

Some of you have already noticed that after finishing the first zone, it’s possible to get stuck, with the time warp portals disappearing. While this isn’t quite working as intended, the truth is that once you’ve finished an area, you’ll only be able to return to it in the present time.

We have a couple of reasons for this, and it wasn’t an easy choice to make. I mean, of course it would have been great if you could always go back to finish any puzzles or secrets you might have missed. On the other hand, we felt like the area would have a bigger impact once you realize that when you’ve seen all there is to the story here, you can’t go back to talk to the people again. They have passed on already and belong only in a distant past which you shouldn’t have had access to in the first place.

We also didn’t want the player to feel frustrated because they can’t go back to, say, the first zone, and simply try to convince Zhamla or Sizou to change their ways once you realize how events in that zone turned Zhamla from a young, optimistic boy into a serious and rather obsessed young man.

We could have just simply not mentioned the fact, or thrown in a line about not changing past events, but again, this way felt like it’d have more of an impact.

Now, obviously you’re not supposed to get stuck anywhere in the present. So how are we gonna solve the fact that there are a ton of blockades that you need time travel to get past?

Cue this guy:

This fellow is a traveling adventurer (with dreams of becoming a Collector, perhaps?) who you’ll meet many times on your journey. Once you’ve finished the first part of Tai Ming, he’ll arrive to move things out of the way and create a passage that you can use as well. Once you’re done with the second zone, he’ll move on and do the same there.

So what about all the treasures you might have missed on your first play through? Worry not, you’ll be able to get them later in the game, one way or another (we have a bunch of ideas), so missing an item in Tai Ming won’t affect your 100% completion if you manage to find it somewhere else later.

After all, hundreds of years have passed since the time when Tai Ming was a bustling town, and it’s not unlikely that once you stop messing around with the time jumps, someone simply moved the items somewhere else.

With this new information, it might be worth going through Tai Ming one more time to see if you missed any secrets, would you say? Head out and collect! The 100% completion awaits you!

Next up, in celebration of having completed my part of Tai Ming’s second zone, I decided to take a quick break from the asian theme and move back to Evergrind City and its surrounding fields!

This map here is in fact the one that can be found north of the farm, in the western Evergrind Fields! It’ll be the key to opening the final dungeon, but until you figure out how to do that it’s just a bunch of resting ruins in the middle of the woods.

For this area, I began with a very simple sketch just to get a feel of the layout. Then I added a bunch of the surrounding props (trees, and the like) with our editor, before creating the new stuff:

Then, it’s on to making the actual ruins:

And finally, adding all the details to bring the place together:

While this map likely won’t be implemented until all three zones of Tai Ming are completed, it’s been on my mind for a long time, and I’m sure the “this way is blocked until we implement temple x” notice has bothered a lot of you guys as well! This way, at least you’ll be able to move around almost everywhere (with the exception of the desert and onwards, which hasn’t been added yet of course) without annoying notices!

And now, time to start working on Zone03. We’ve already begun prototyping most of the area, with the exception of the final two rooms (one which will house the Mimic boss, and one which will feature… something else).

Our very first prototype consists of extremely simple black & white sketches, where I just draw whatever I think would look cool. I mainly freestyle the size of each map, but try to keep in mind certain things like whether there will be battles taking place, or where the camera will pause in cutscenes and such.

Once I’ve sketched whatever I feel is important to size-check or run by the others, I give the sketches to Teddy who adds them to the game engine. He won’t add any colliders or anything at this point, but often he’ll make sure the doors work in cases like this where we need to run through more than one map connected to one another.

Then, me, Teddy and Fred run through the maps in multiplayer, talking about what we think as we go along. Are the rooms big enough? Will there be enough room to fight? Does the camera position well?

Often I’ve come up with ideas for what should happen in the rooms, either before or while I make the sketches, and in this multiplayer test we tend to brainstorm a lot as well. We’ll ask ourselves things like “wouldn’t it be cool if this happened here”, or “wouldn’t it be nice to have a painting of x there”, among other things.

In the case above, I made a design with 2 tables, but as we talked about what the flashback orb will show in this room, we decided it’d be better to have it take place at one long table instead. We talked about how long the table should be, and two of us had to act as indicators so I could take a screenshot and add a table approx. the size the characters show (plus some more decorations):

After going through each of the rooms in a similar way, with us talking about the sketches and me editing them as per what we decide, we’ve got a decent “whitebox” version of the place. There are no final graphics, but since we’re satisfied with the size, it’s possible to start adding colliders as well as prototyping enemy encounters.

Since this zone is only four rooms, two outdoor areas and a boss fight, we certainly hope finishing this place will be faster than zone02. There will be a lot of epic things happening here though, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see how many super difficult animations Fred will have to make before we’re satisfied…. Stay tuned ;)

Another week, and more Puzzle World!

Now, the battle room! As you might guess from the name, this is where a bunch of battles will take place, likely an encounter with several waves (though we haven’t decided on any specifics yet):

For this room, I kind of wanted to add a mascot of some sort. A lot of theme parks use mascots here and there for decoration, and I thought this place shouldn’t be no different. And what better shape than a puzzle piece? Perhaps I should add some more, maybe of different shapes and colors, to other rooms!

The floor is kind of bare in this room, as it’s a fighting room and we don’t want you to run into a bunch of colliders as you battle (cause that’s super annoying). I did add some boxes to the corners though, since I didn’t want the room to look completely empty. Since this place was never really finished, I think it makes sense that boxes with supplies for the continued development of the theme park still remain here and there.

Next room is the monkey challenge room, which has been previewed in a previous post. Here, the player will try to steal back a key from a gang of annoying monkeys, intent on keeping the key to themselves!

As with the fighting room, the key to this room is to keep the floor as clean (from colliders) as possible, since you’ll spend your time in here trying to beat up and chasing enemies back and forth. Since we had a prototype for this room already, I kept the same size as in the test. It worked well enough when we tried it, so no point changing a size that already works!

I did shorten the distance to the exit though: such a long corridor didn’t make a lot of sense, and would – in my opinion – only look visually worse than the shorter distance :)

And now, the final Puzzle World room!! This one is the Path Puzzle room, where you have to move a set of statues around in the past so that they are at the right place in present day…

While a lot of these graphics were already made and reused from previous rooms, I had to do some pretty cool new stuff for this one! For one, this room needed two levels, which meant I had to make a railing of sorts to make it easier to tell the levels apart:

I also had to make that big glass thingy, containing something you need to figure out how to get out of there! And it was a lot of fun: shiny things are the best to make!

Now, as the third zone of Tai Ming – and the final challenge(s) of the dungeon – draws near, we decided it was time to have a meeting to flesh out the final boss of the dungeon: an ancient Mimic!

Pretty much since we started developing Grindea, we’ve known we wanted a boss mimic somewhere in the world, and once we knew the third “temple” would be an ancient town where time travel is the focus, we couldn’t think of a better place for our Mimic!

The time travel aspect of this place helped us come up with one of the key features of this boss battle: it will be divided into three phases, where each phase ends with a time shift, during which the Mimic gains strenght. Basically, you start the battle in the past, and once you’re close to defeating the first, young, version of the mimic, you’ll get sent forward in time, where a bunch of years have passed. The mimic, unaffected by your time jumping, will have grown in size and power over the years, and poses a bigger challenge…

During the first phase, the mimic is little more than a jumpkin – but in the shape of a chest. It will have one or two special attacks, but this is definitely the easiest stage, and should be over pretty quickly.

In the second phase, the mimic has grown to the size of Giga Slime (roughly). The battle will remind you of that boss as well, as the mimic jumps around the battlefield, doing damage with its massive body. It also has a series of special attacks where it spits a ton of coins on the ground in different patterns – which may hurt you as they land – and goes to eat them up straight away, dealing damage to anyone in its path. Sometimes, it will spit out a powerup of some sort as well – and if you fail to destroy it before the Mimic eats it up again, it will gain a powerboost against you. Like Giga Slime, the Mimic will also have an attack resembling the hammer-attack of Giga Slime; basically a regular attack it can pull if you stand too close to it for too long. Only instead of producing a slime hammer, it will use any of the weapons inside of it (or its tongue)!

In the third phase, the boss has grown to a massive size, and is now static. It will attack you using any of its many hatches to send out weapons of various kinds against you. It also has a special attack where it blows you to the opposite end of the screen and sends out a ton of things from its inside! These things might be enemies (from anywhere in the game), barrels, crates, items, money – basically anything you can think of.

This is one ancient mimic, and it’s been stuffed with things over the years!

Since the boss is divided into three different phases, we haven’t given each phase too many attacks. As we start prototyping this battle, it’s possible we’ll add more, but I think this is one of those bosses where the battle might be challenging enough even without 500x different attack patterns! I guess we’ll see – either case I’m very excited to see this in the game.

No game set in a fantasy world is complete without a mimic, right? :)

Hello guys! It’s been another week, and now I (Vilya) am back with another recap of the big things we’ve been working on :D

This week, the work on Puzzle World continues! Next step is to transform the Statue Room into it’s sorry present state. Since this will be the first room to be turned into a present version, it’s extra important to get everything right since a bunch of the props, such as the planks, will be reused in upcoming rooms.

Here’s a GIF showing the process:

As usual with transforming rooms or environments from past (fresh & new) to present (old and worn), most of it is changing colors. But just turning a bright yellow into a dull brown won’t cut it in many cases, such as the door: as wood grows old, it will get worn down and cracks may appear. Therefore I added more lines in the wood, as well as holes here and there, where I imagine the wood has been broken over time:

Next room is a little different! It’s been sponsored by the Flying Fortress crew, and so it has been decorated to look like a room in Flying Fortress – only with wallpapers and a fake floor… :)

When creating this room, I had two options. Either I use the already-made texture of the Flying Fortress walls & floor, or I make a new one. It’s likely people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, since it was so long since you went through the Flying Fortress in the main story – but I still opted to make new graphics.

I did this for two reasons: one, it gave me the opportunity to make the texture look even more like a wallpaper texture – instead of looking exactly like it does in Flying Fortress (which is built of what’s at least supposed to be real rocks), I could make a softer texture which would be easier to pass off as wallpaper. Second, the Flying Fortress graphics are very old at this point, and I worried that adding such an old texture among all the new stuff would look jarring – I’ve developed a lot as an artist since that time, so the difference in quality and style is quite big.

The smaller screen to the right will hold a message about the room being sponsored by the Flying Fortress – the big one to the right will either have something cool animated by Fred, or a graphic representation of the flying Fortress made by me. Or maybe a graphic representation of the Flying Fortress made by Fred or something cool (non-animated) made by me – who knows! :)

Since this room is already quite gloomy to begin with, it was a bit of a challenge to darken and dull the colors down without everything becoming too dark for the present version. Instead of going too crazy with the darkening effects, I decided to ruin more of the wallpaper around the areas where you’ll run around, having the real wall show through:

After finishing the past version, I added a pair of boxes that block the exit to the right. In this version however, the boxes are moved (since you enter the room in this timeline) and instead block your path to the top part of the room. To get there, you’ll need to complete the phase shift puzzle!

And yes, for those who noticed the difference between the Past and Present version: we decided to change the design of the left platform a little, as the previous version was a little hard to read for some people. The previous version is to the left, the new version to the right:

Next, after Fred finished adding some NPCs to the inn (left), I took over and added some props that I thought would suit them:

The girl on the right is a bit underage, so instead of drinking she’s having a meal while studying hard to become a Collector like her sister (which will also be added to the table later on). Faita, the sword teacher from the first zone, is kind of drowning her disbelief at being second best at everything with a glass of unnamed alcohol (or is it soda?) ;)

Meanwhile, instead of cleaning up the bar, Montbel the owner (who isn’t present in the picture) has left all kinds of bottles and bowls on it for visual effect. ‘Aint he nice?

Speaking of NPCs, Fred has kept working on adding more of them to Tai Ming’s second zone, so here’s another bunch:

Finally, let’s end the week with a portrait! I actually forgot I still had two more to make for the second Tai Ming zone. Guess I got a little bit too excited about starting to make backgrounds for Puzzle World!

This guy is a hat salesman, having his shop set up outside the ancient Collector’s HQ. Like the hat salesman in Evergrind City, he has a kind of elegance to him! I guess it comes with the job, huh?