The work on the Gold Charges continues! There are now prototypes available for all skills, but a lot of them still need to have their animations polished so we’ll save showing those off for later. The Whirlslash gold charge has been more or less finished up though, and here you can see a gif of what that looks like in action:

You guessed it! Once you unlock the Gold charge, you can now move while using it! Pretty epic, no? The damage might be sliiightly unbalanced in this GIF tho.. ;)

Vilya has returned to working on the next Temple area, which in reality is more of a village. That means the future will hold lots of houses! Here’s the interior of two, with progress videos to go with them:

Now, no village is complete without people that live there, right? Here’s a couple of portraits of people that you will be able to meet, one an adventurer exploring the depths of Mt:Bloom, the other an inhabitant of the village itself:

Also, as Teddy’s properly adding the skills into the game engine, it’s not very uncommon for the animations to go through some iterations. The gold charge for the Ice Spike ended up needing some extra pazazz, as the old animation looked a bit to funky on it’s own. Below is a (hopefully) more intimidating ice spike, couple with some stray left over animations for the Frosty Friend!

This week we’ve been working on two things: the main boss of the Temple of Seasons, as well as getting the first half of the temple ready for beta testing.

We want to keep the boss stuff hidden for now, but if you want a sneak-peek of what you’ll be facing, be sure to check Vilya’s blog in the coming days, as she’ll be uploading his boss portrait there.

In the meanwhile, here’s a bunch of expressions that Vilya has been making for the Temple of Seasons cutscenes:

She also finally got around to updating the library back in Evergrind City, which means you might eventually be able to go there as well:

One of the quirks that sets the Temple of Seasons apart from the rest of our dungeons is of course the Season Change ability we showcased a while back. While combat kind of takes a lead role, navigating through out the temple using the seasons will hopefully be a strong co-star!

Fred has been creating a bunch of different obstacles that block and open up different areas of the temple depending on the active season within the room.

This post is a day late, because somehow we managed to forget that it was Monday yesterday and just kept working like it was any other day of the week… Gotta blame the crazy heat wave that’s been going on here, we Swedes can’t handle degrees over 25°C without going insane! ;)

Anyway! More Toy Factory this week. Most of it has been fleshed out by now – all that remains is polish and the boss fight, which Teddy is currently working on. Here’s a glimpse of another of the rooms, this one having a larger conveyor belt that provides a different type of obstacle for the player:

Vilya has been busy making additional expressions for some of the characters that will appear in the cutscenes, but she’s also had time to remake a bunch of old portraits to better suit the new style:

Fred is currently having well-earned summer vacation with his family and friends, so there will probably be an absence of animations to show off these coming weeks. We hope he has a great time and enjoys his time off instead (the weather sure couldn’t be better)!

This week we’ve focused on completing the prototyping of the entire Toy Factory, as well as applying some polish to its first half. For posterity, we’ve saved all the different development stages of a challenge room, to show you what prototype iteration can look like!

This was our first iteration. It’s pretty hard to see what’s going on since it’s all place holder graphics, but the idea was to have conveyor belts going in circles through the room (the fields with arrows), and the red dots were things you had to strike with your weapon when they appeared.

The challenge was designed so that you needed to use the speed boost from the conveyor belts to quickly move around the room in order to hit the different targets before they disappeared.

We implemented a prototype of the challenge, but quickly realized that it wasn’t up to par. The challenge was there, but it didn’t feel good. Sometimes, that last part is just lack of polish, but this time we felt it went beyond that. We decided to scrap it entirely.

Back at the drawing board, we decided to experiment with a mechanic that was intended for the Toy Factory boss, namely toy trains. This idea was, in short, to have trains go around a track to provide dynamic area denial while having the players face a second challenge, which originally was going to be fighting enemies.

After brainstorming a bit, we decided against the enemies since it would be too similar to other encounters in the mini-dungeon, and instead came up with the idea of piling on a second type of area denial: falling bombs. For this, we moved things around a bit and came up with this layout:

The playfield was divided into nine squares (term used loosely here). Bombs would fall inside randomly chosen squares, between which trains would zoom by on the rails. The challenge was to move between the squares, while simultaneously dodging trains. Each train crossing had a track switch, which changed at regular intervals, causing the train patterns to constantly differ.

Using the map above, we implemented a prototype of the trains themselves, as well as their switching. This time, it felt interesting right off the bat, and we decided to go forward with this idea and continue iterating.

This is how the background looked after cleaning things up and measuring distances. At this point, we added the falling bombs to the prototype.

It felt pretty good, but oftentimes the trains would be too chaotic for player effort to actually be rewarded. You’d feel you had a good read on the situation, but then a switch changed and suddenly a train could still blindside you as you moved between the squares.

We decided that by making the pattern consistent, we could improve clarity and decrease frustration while still maintaining what made the challenge interesting.

Time to click!

In the end, this was the prototype we went for. The image above links to an animated GIF, so be sure to click on it! Note that this is still the prototype; there’s a whole bunch of polish left, as you can see, but the core gameplay is there.

This little story is a good example of how gameplay can (and will) change as you go along, and that you should never expect your initial idea to be perfect as-is.

It also conveys the issue of hidden/surprise development time – one of the biggest reasons it’s so damn hard to estimate how long things will take on a macro level. This is why young companies (ourselves included) so often are very optimistic in the beginning regarding how long time a game will take to make.

You can look at some other game that took years to make and go “hey, I could make a game like that in six months” and you might be right, but then you never take into account all systems, sub-systems, prototypes, sprites, models, textures and lines of code that had to be made and thrown away in order for that final game to grow into existence.

Some closing food-for-thought: almost every game you’ve ever played has gone through this at almost every stage of development. Even amazing triple A games has looked terrible and been a clunky mess to play at some point!

The cutscenes have stayed in focus this week (to Teddys delight!) so Fred spent some quality time with the Master of the Collectors Headquarters which we showed last week, making her fit to enter the big stage!

Speaking of stage, of course the master has her own room in the HQ. What it looks like? We’re glad you asked! Here’s the place where you’ll find her:

She certainly has interesting taste in interior design..!

Other than creating this room, Vilya has also been making some new portraits. These guys are a bunch of Collector Scientists, working in the HQ:

On a whole different note, both Fred and Vilya just handed in their final school assignment for this semester. Thanks to all of you who’ve supported us by pre-ordering the game, they won’t have to continue their studies for at least another year! This not only means a whole lot of less stress in their life but it also means all of us will be able to focus whole heartedly on the game for now, which in short feels amazing. 

A big bunch of love to all of you who’ve made this possible!

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:

The past week has mainly been focused on spending time with our families, eating good food and catching up with friends who are home over the holidays. While production have had to take a backseat for a brief moment, we have recharged our batteries and are ready for a new year of hard development. Hopefully, Santa Slime will be bringing a full release of Secrets of Grindea next year instead of lousy beta keys!

With that said, we’ve made some progress even though the holidays have been lurking around everywhere! The temple has steadily been getting a more finished renovation both inside and outside.

Vilya have also managed to squeeze out some card art for the Guardian enemy we showed a few weeks back. Bling-bling at its finest!

All in all, we would like to thank everybody for the support and feedback we have recivied through out this year. We read everything you guys say and take a lot of it to heart, be it good or bad things. If 2013 brings half of the love you’ve showed us during 2012, we will be more than happy. See you on the other side, happy new year!

This week our work with the dungeon has continued! Fred and Teddy has kept crunching back in Visby, fiddling around with the various mechanics and animations for the enemies in the flying dungeon.

One of their latest creations is this little fellow, a robot that will feature as a mini-boss halfway (or so) through the dungeon!

The robot might not look like much in this form, but he’s a nasty one! He’s been programmed to transform himself into a swarm of magic orbs, beaming across the room while damaging everything in his way. Your only chance to kill him is in the scarce moments when he’s actually still in this physical form! But beware, he might have a surprise in store as you come close as well…

While the boys have been working on that, Vilya has been preparing the rooms in which the enemies will be found. Some of them can be seen here (click to enlarge the pictures):

This it the room that comes just before the boss room. You will begin your journey here and come back to it in the end, after you successfully managed to unlock the door by starting three different machines throughout the dungeon.

This room will house one of the puzzles of the dungeon, which is directly related to a skill you’ll learn here. The skill allows you to beam from one area in a room to another. How it will be done will be explained later – there will also be a visual cue where it is possible.

Expect to see more of the dungeon next week! :3

One of the things we believe make a game more interesting is mini-games. And no game is complete without some good old target practice games! Therefore we have spent some time making such a game for the newly reintroduced bow. This mini-game can be found at the same location you find your bow, in this archer’s cottage just south of Evergrind City:

The archer also works part-time doing wall paintings…

The game is pretty straight forward as of now: You get a limited number of arrows which you can use to hit the various slime boards that pass you by.

You score more points depending on which color slime you hit, with the blue slimes in the back giving the most points. Of course, they’re also the hardest to hit – not only do they get covered by the two rows closer to you, they also move a lot faster.

If you’re skilled enough and hit several slimes in a row within a short time frame, you’ll score additional combo points.

We look forward to seeing your high scores in the beta forums once the patch is up and running ;)

Other than that, here are some new hats which might make it to the patch:

After a few hectic days at Gamex, we would like to thank everybody who played the game, gave us feedback or just stopped by to talk to us. It was a blast as always seeing people play the game for the first time. Hopefully, we’ll be back again next year with a version near completion.

Even though we’ve had a pretty busy week, production never stops!

Vilya has begun working on graphical assets for our very first dungeon in the game, which is kind of super exciting! There’s still some other things we must rap up before we can start actually designing the dungeon it self, but we’ll get there soon enough.

In short (and without spoiling too much, but still spoiling) the first dungeon is a ancient military base, driven by magic technology. It is inhabited by strange military machines designed purely for combat. Since Grindea has been at peace for a long time, what the Ancients needed a military base for is somewhat of a mystery. A mystery for you to solve!

We did some experimenting with the colors and lighting before settling on somewhat of a darker tone.

The first version, above, which we discarded shortly after.

Second version, which we liked better! With enemy sketches and character added for effect.

We felt the second both fit the theme better, as well as helping the enemies stand out from the background. Of course, we still wanted it to feel like both the enemies and the environment belong together. Therefore we chose to use magical energy details in both the backdrop as well as the enemies themselves, to connect the two. Once again, we did some minor variations of the color of the energy, to help separate the two even further.

Besides the temple, Fred has done some NPC animations, as well as wrapping up the level 5 version of the Fireball spell.