This week, we’ve finished up the final interior of Tai Ming’s second zone: the monkey lab! Here is the past version:

Before designing this place, I (Vilya) had a talk with Fred and Teddy about what level of technology we wanted this place to have. We had plenty of options: we could either go full Flying Fortress style with lasers and very high technology, or we could go more primitive and ancient-oriented.

Since we wanted this area to feel quite modern for Tai Ming (making it stand out and all), we decided to keep it kind of high-tech, but not Flying Fortress laser-level. So there’s steel bars, lots of documentation, some glass vials and strange potions, some which will be animated and added later on by Fred!

After completing the above version, we decided to have one big cage rather than two small, with two monkeys in it. We also added some cracks to illustrate where a hole will be in the present, as well:

For the Present version, the walls & floor need to become more dull & dark, the glass windows have broken, papers have been shredded… and the poor monkeys who were stuck in the cage have died (unless… you decide to let them out) :(

Aside from these interiors, we also added a bunch of smaller stuff: changing the brown chests into purple ones on the banners in the past, to reflect the fact that the chests in Tai Ming will, in fact, be purple:

We also wanted to Tai Ming-ify the doors inside the ancient Collector’s HQ a bit, so I added some fancy door frame decorations to them:

Just for fun and some flavor, an optional chest has appeared in Tai Ming’s present state, as well! But however will you be able to reach it with all the rocks blocking the way?

There’s a couple of new characters, as well! This ancient version of Quinton (an ancestor, perhaps?) is the Quest Master of Tai Ming’s Collector’s HQ. He’ll give you one or two quests you need to complete in the town before you can proceed into the next zone:

Those of you who paid attention to the text screens in the Phase Puzzle course in Mount Bloom should be familiar with Tonee, who wrote about the course in some detail!

Well, here she is, visiting Tai Ming with her engineer friend from last week:

What they’re doing there? Showing off the latest Phase Shifting technology of course! These things don’t fund themselves, you know ;)

Finally, here’s another giant Thorn-Worm, the ULTIMATE version, made & animated by Fred:

How much worse can that fight get, really?! Whew…

Next week, I’ll finish up the graphics for Tai Ming’s second zone, while Fred works on some much needed NPC sprites for the area! Next after that, Puzzle World, the short mini puzzle-dungeon “hidden” in the north of the zone. Stay tuned! :)

Over the course of the development of Secrets of Grindea, which has gone on for five (5!) years now, we’ve had many different ways of keeping track of decisions made in the past and where to head in the future.

Unfortunately they’ve varied in usefulness – turns out, simply talking about something in the group and then expecting everyone to remember the outcome of that conversation doesn’t work quite that well. In fact, more than once we’ve had the exact same conversation several times, with different outcomes, where people have changed their opinion over time, or we simply don’t remember which idea we thought was best.

To solve this we’ve used a variety of documentation methods – we’ve kept our meetings documented physically through a notebook I’ve (Vilya) brought to them, and sometimes we’ve used our “agenda” document (basically a to-talk-about list for each upcoming meeting) to document what we talked about and what it resulted in. There’s also been attempts to have a Upcoming Quests document, an Arcade Mode document (with future arcade mode mechanics), and a Story Mode document with random bits and pieces about the game written down randomly.

After trying to navigate through these documents for a while, searching for the answer to another one of our eternal “what did we say about subject x?” questions, I decided it was time to clean things up.

So, over the last few days I’ve been merging all of our documentation – the quest documents, the contents of my notebook, the Story Mode- and Arcade Mode- documents and ordered them properly in a single Google Docs document:

In order to keep things easy to find, we decided to sort this new all-powerful list area by area in chronological order, starting with a “General” section for things affecting general gameplay (such as visible healthbars for co-op), and ending with all things Arcade Mode. Thanks to their “new” (at least, I hadn’t seen it before) outline feature, it became very easy to navigate through the content once I was done, but if the feature wasn’t available I’d probably created something similar in a regular text document, adding a table of contents in the beginning.

We’re very glad to have this new documentation method, which hopefully will save us some time when looking up what exactly we decided after having discussions, and why we came to that conclusion. It is likely we’ll still have to talk about some things again, of course, as we do tend to change our minds around – but at least now we don’t have to take it all from the beginning again!

Now, this week hasn’t been all about documentation, of course. We’ve also continued work on Tai Ming’s second zone (which is drawing closer and closer to completion, art asset wise anyway). In order to prepare for the Giant Thorn-worm battle, we’ve made a battle-worn version of the HQ outdoors:

We also continued on the government/administration building from last week, creating it’s present state as well:

..and finally, yet another character joins the fray! When I made this guy (yes, it’s a he – or it’s supposed to be, anyway), I had some a vision of some kind of mix between Remedi the alchemist in Evergrind City, and a vampire. Yeah I know, don’t ask where these ideas come from. I have no idea! Anyway, he’s supposed to sell potion in Tai Ming’s second zone, and here he is:

That’s all for this week! Next week will most likely be an animation special, as I’ll be taking a couple days off (first vacation days this year!! wohoo) and probably won’t be around to write the next post :)

See you!

It’s been yet another week, and work on Tai Ming’s second zone continues!

Vilya has been making more interiors and characters, more boss testing has been made, there’s been some playing around with future puzzles… Lots of stuff! Let’s take a look at our more important new graphics:

First up, some new interiors. Moving below stairs in the Inn, it’s time to take a look at the inn’s storage room! Here the innkeeper stores whatever things he does not need, and it also houses something you need to progress the story:

The next house belongs to Tessen, the young girl you met in the first map of Tai Ming. She has now grown up to be a young lady, living in her own house in the second zone:

When making this map, we wanted it to resemble her grandfather’s home in the first zone, so we made sure to bring some of those items over in order to give the player a sense of recognition (hopefully)!

There’s also another character, with another portrait! This guy is another one of those “silly” portraits, featuring the villager in charge of Tai Ming’s dam. He’s kind of a slob and loves drinking, plus he tends to fall asleep on the job. Oh well, good thing you can take charge of raising and lowering Tai Ming’s water levels for him (and in doing so, reach some new places on the map)!

Meanwhile, Fred has been cleaning up the boss animations, turning them from sketchy versions with stray pixels going wild here and there, to smooth and crisp finished animations! Take a look at these before and after versions of its dig- and tail wiggle animations:

This week we’ve continued working on the interior of Tai Ming’s second zone. Vilya started with the Inn, making a Past and Present version of its first floor:

This past version of the floor will in time be filled with NPCs relaxing after a long day’s work, enjoying food and/or a drink! The present version, meanwhile..

…will house a fight! Which is the reason why we’ve removed some of the furniture, and made the tables lie on the floor (it’s usually better having less stuff blocking your way when you’re busy fighting).

We’ve also added another character, a scientist assistant whom you’ll meet in the Monkey lab:

Plus, some fixes here and there across the map:

Last but not least, Teddy and Fred have continued working on the worm boss, which is nearing a completed state gameplay-wise! Most of the graphics are still WIP, but here’s a taste of what our current inhouse prototype of this boss looks like:

And to end this post, here’s a few complimentary animations of the above boss, made by Fred:

We’re back for another recap! In case you missed it, we already added a tiny patch to the Frontline beta, featuring some bug fixes but also a solution to a problem a lot of people have been having with the first zone!

I’m of course talking about the fact that it takes a while before you realize you can push the statue out of the way in the past! To, hopefully, solve this, we’ve added a couple of things that hopefully nudges you in the right direction:

First up, we added the above NPC, pushing a statue back and forth in the top part of the map. He is based off the stonecutter in Evergrind City (an ancestor, perhaps?), and speaking to him will further explain that the statues are light and movable!

We also added the remnants of the statue trail to the ground in the present, hoping that it will make players think about possible ways to get around the rubble:

A lot of you have already made it past this puzzle, so it’s gonna be a bit difficult to tell whether these additions actually help or not. Hopefully, once the temple launches on the stable beta, we’ll get some idea based on how many people ask how to get past the statues :)

Some other things we’ve been working on includes a bunch of hats:

The statue hat is already in the game, while the rest will be Arcade Mode rewards or found in the next map, where the monkey enemy will be introduced!

And speaking of the second map, work on it is progressing smoothly so far. Here’s the present, ruined version of an interior we posted before:

Fred, meanwhile, has started working on the next boss battle, which will take place in the next map as well! This features a giant worm, and here’s a little sneak peek of what that will look like, surrounded by its spawn:

This week, we’ve been finishing things up for another frontline update coming later this week! This means Teddy has been busy dealing with balancing, bug fixing and multiplayer support for said portion of the game, and Fred has made some final animations for the upcoming battle:

Vilya also needed to finish something for this update, and unfortunately for Master Ivy, her task was to create a ruined version of Master Ivy’s office:

Once she had completed that task, she went on to improve one of the old Mt:Bloom outskirts maps, adding some greenery and vines to it:

And speaking of Mt:Bloom Outskirts, we kind of need a map from where you can enter the actual mountain, right? So that was made as well:

Since creating WIP GIFs was pretty fun to do, here’s one featuring the creation of the above map as well:

This week we hope to finish things up with the boss battle so that we can update frontline, and Vilya will start getting the Mt:Bloom backgrounds ready for implementation! Soon, it’s time to explore it’s hidden cave systems.. :)

First of all, thank you all for your comments on last week’s blog post, where we asked about how to make it easier to understand the gold points! It seems like you guys are more or less as divided as we are, so we’ll keep thinking about that for a while longer.. :)

Now, on to this week’s post!

Last week we made an interesting decision! Many have asked us for a way to buy back items sold by mistake, and we’ve thought about how and where to add it. We figured, in the end, that we’d turn the shady merchant of Evergrind City into a “buy back” feature, rather than an accessory shop, and let the actual Accessory Shop have its own building, like the rest of the shops! As such, Vilya got to work to create the assets needed.

First up, we needed to decide on the perfect location. And which would be better than the closed off house next to the Blacksmith:

Next up, the building needed a sign, to fit in with the rest of shops! Here’s Vilya’s step-by-step of making it, as well as what it looks like on top of the building:

Now that we have the exterior, we need to create the interior as well, where you’ll actually buy stuff:

Finally, no shop is complete without it’s shopkeeper, right? And here she is:

Now, there are no animations from Fred this week, and that’s because in order to speed things up, he’s making placeholder animations rather than rendering them all to completion one by one. This way, he can make many more sketches & half-finished animations to give to Teddy, who in turn can start working on the cutscene using these placeholders instead of having to wait until every single animation is done! Afterwards, Fred can clean them up and Teddy will just replace the image source!

Pretty nifty, if you ask me. Of course, it also means no animations to show here for a while, as posting half-finished things has had a tendency to confuse people who believe it’s actually the finished thing. Hang in there for now!

Things have calmed down after the Steam Early Access launch, and things have gone back to normal here in the Pixel Ferrets office!

Vilya has spent a lot of time doing portraits recently, both for the new area(s) and for new fae that will appear in Santa Fae:

Some of the old fae (and the new) also needed new expressions, seeing as the life of a fae is filled with both joy and horror currently:

She has also, of course, been doing new backgrounds for the next temple, which means more interiors left in ruin:

Fred, meanwhile, has been creating stuff for a flashback cutscene that will take place once you get back to the HQ in the next part of the story! This whole thing will involve two things primarily: your mother Charlotte, and…. a dragon?!

Now, as for Teddy, he’s been mostly busy implementing a bunch of UI improvements (Sword and Shield style-slots, wohoo!) as well as tweaks and fixing bugs revealed to us by our awesome beta testers! Once these updates roll out and are confirmed stable we’ll start updating Frontline only for a while again, starting with the cutscene/flashback thingy mentioned above.

See you next week! :D

First of all, thank you all for your support and awesome e-mails, helpful forum comments, and everything else related to our Steam Early Access launch last week! You guys have been amazing.

In terms of how the EA launch went, it was well over our expectations. We honestly didn’t think much was gonna happen, seeing as we did literally 0 PR for the launch, but apparently word of mouth (and Steam’s discovery features) are more powerful than we thought. Because of this there were a couple of hectic days where most of our time went into answering e-mails and solving new bugs, but thankfully (?!) most of that seems to have calmed down for now. :)

So, yesterday we patched the game (both Stable and Frontline) and added a bunch of bug fixes!

If you had issues with co-op before, chances are your problems have been solved now – or so we hope! We also added a bunch of new hairstyles that can be tried out at Francisco’s stand in Evergrind City or when you create a new character. We’ll update both builds at least once more before focusing on Frontline again for a while – if you’re a new player and are unsure of what I’m talking about, check out this thread on the forums to see the difference between Stable and Frontline beta, and how to change between them.

Some of you have noticed that the DRM-free version available through the Humble widgets and on the Humble Store is outdated (same goes for the Demo download through our site). We’ll update both of those once we’ve patched the Stable one last time in the coming week(s)! In the meanwhile, if you’re looking to play the Demo, know that a more recent version can be downloaded through Steam (there’s a button which says ‘Download Demo’ right next to the ‘Early Access Game’-box).

Now, we’ll continue to work on the next part of the Story Mode! Vilya is of course already working on backgrounds for the next temple, some which can be seen here:

I think we’ll leave it at that for this week, tune in next Monday for more updates on our progress! And again, thank you all for your support :)

The Steam Early Access launch draws closer! Either today or tomorrow we’ll patch the gold charges into the game, and once they’ve been tested and polished (certain visual elements are still missing) I think we’re good to go :D

SO, once the game is patched we ask all Frontline users to help us bug test these babies! Perhaps it’s time to try out a completely new build? :)

In the meanwhile, here’s a few GIFs featuring gold charges that will be available in the patch once it goes live:

First up is Frosty Friend! He’s certainly gotten bigger, and as of the next patch, you can give him commands!

He starts out with a defensive stance which increases his DEF and regenerates HP slowly if he’s out of combat, the silver charge unlocks a DPS boosting skill that lasts a few seconds, and the gold charge has an AoE slam attack (pictured above)! :)

Here’s the Heroic Slam! The animation has gotten a bit more elaborate, as you can see, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same old skill, but with increased damage output!

Finally, the Cloud Strike, aka the summoned cloud! He’s as happy as ever, striking left and right with his fearsome thunder. Other than being bigger and meaner, he also has a chain lightning effect on certain attacks :)

We haven’t stopped working on the next temple either! Here are some new backgrounds and character portraits that Vilya has been working on:

Once the patch goes live we’ll make a post on Facebook, Twitter, and of course, details will be found over at the Patch Notes part of our forums :)