Finally, after such a long wait, the Translation Suite is officially live! This means that it’s now possible to download and use fan translations within the game, as pictured below:

All you need to do to access these is to go into “Options” in the Main Menu, and select “Browse Translations”. If you’re interested in making a translation of your own, there are instructions on how to do that in this post on the forums! :)

This patch also brought an addition to Arcade Mode in the form of the Mold Essence feature:

While the proper art isn’t implemented yet (there will be some color changes and the text will be centered properly), it definitely works and will allow you to spend those hard earned essences on new bragging rights style items!

Meanwhile, Vilya has been preparing facial expressions for the legendary cutscene, a mockup of Evergrind City by night (& festival!):

She’s also been updating the Shop titles, giving them a bit more personality and unique looks:

As for Fred, he’s moved on to creating animations for the festival and it’s mini games! Below is one odd-looking machine that you’ll be able to use once we get this darn cutscene out of the way ;)

Next week, Teddy will be working on the cutscene, Fred will make more animations for the Festival, and Vilya will all sorts of random things! Stay tuned ;3

As mentioned last week, we’re working full speed on getting the final charges up and running! While we’re not ready to patch them into the game yet, here’s a preview of three of them in action:

Click to view full-size

The Summon Plant gold charge introduces a new type of plant to the bunch. Instead of attacking, it’ll give bonuses to the plants you’ve already summoned (and will be summoned with a number of minion-plants of its own).  

You can only have one of these plants active at the same time, so if you summon it again it’ll move to your new location. However, it’ll bring any plants surrounding it along with it, so it’s perfect for moving plant traps to new strategic places!

Click to view full-size

Piercing Dash, meanwhile, has become both faster and longer, allowing you to dash through enemies and deal damage to them after passing through! For the more advanced players it might also be good to know that this level of Dash is now cancel-able, and canceling mid-dash will allow your next skill to become instantly gold charged.

Time for some epic combos? :)

Click to view full-size

Finally, the Blade Flurry gold charge increases the number of hits and has a 3-hit finisher that deals additional damage!

Now, while the boys have been busy with the skills, Vilya has kept working on improvements for the menu. Here’s the improved Equipment tab:

As you can see, we’re finally introducing style slots for weapons and shields! This is something that has been requested a lot, and since we’re reworking this menu anyway we thought we might as well squeeze it in. As we’d like the Steam Early Access release to happen sooner rather than later, though, we’re not 100% sure the style slots will be implemented before the EA release, but it’s definitely coming soon after, at the very least.

We’re also reworking the Character tab:

Gone is the boring super brown text-only tab, and instead we have a more colorful and actually ID-looking tab for your collector. The Birthday and Starsign will be randomly generated, as will your Collector ID number. Also, the stats you see here are temporary: we’re replacing a few and removing others. Since this isn’t actually implemented yet, there may be small changes here and there, but the overall look should remain.

Next week, Vilya will finally return to doing stuff for the next temple, while Teddy & Fred soldier on with more gold charges!

Hi guys! Another week has gone past, and it’s finally getting warm in Sweden (yay)!
In the office, we’ve been spendin’ time on a bunch of different things. Teddy & Fred are working on the Gold Charge Skills, so we have a bunch of prototypes up and running! They’re still in need of some edits and huge amounts of polish, but we’re getting there.

Vilya kept working on menu edits, and the left side of the menu will officially look like this once it’s been implemented:

A bit less brown, and a bit more graphic heavy, with swirls and decorations added since last week :)

Speaking of graphic heavy, she’s also been repainting the haircuts & polished the various palettes available for them. We had a bunch of issues with the old ones, where skintone pixels were visible through the hair in some styles, and the overall rendering technique wasn’t the best. Also, we found the palettes to be pretty lackluster…

So, that has hopefully been fixed, and should be up and running within the next few patches!

Hairstyle Reworks, Part 1:

Hairstyle Reworks, Part 2:

New Palettes:

(For the palette previews we’ve used different haircuts, so some of the colors might look a bit different than they do when you apply them to the same style!)

Next week (technically, this week) we’ll continue working on the Gold Charges, so hopefully we’ll be able to show you some of that next recap! See you then! :)

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:

Hi guys! I’m gonna keep this blog post brief because we’re in the middle of judging Gotland Game Conference 2015, but I really wanted this update to be on time!

So, as you may have noticed if you played the game in the last few days, we’ve added a “quicklevel”-system to Arcade Mode!

This allows you to quickly level any skills and talents you’ve recently been leveling, without having to browse through the menu to find them all over again. Here’s a GIF showing the difference (click to watch full-sized version):

Other than that, Vilya has kept working on improving the earlier graphics! This time around, she went over the menu icons (old versions on the top, new versions on the bottom):

She also went back and touched up a bunch of portraits, and created this new one:

Fred has kept working on the gold charge animations, focusing on giving the snow buddy some actual animations this week!

 

Hope you guys have had a great week! We have one more day of judging games, then it’s all back to normal. Perhaps we’ll talk a bit about our experience with this year’s GGC in the next update, if any of you are interested in that sort of thing! Until then, see you! :D

In case you missed our tweet about it, and doesn’t frequent the forum, the Steam network update is now live on the Frontline beta!

You can either use the interfaces available in-game (as shown above), or use your friend list in the Steam overlay to invite or join friends playing a multiplayer game!

Now that the Steam stuff is all in place (and seems to be running surprisingly smoothly so far), Teddy is finally free to work on other things! The next patch is going to feature a more fleshed out Seasonne, as well as a proper ending for the Temple of Seasons.

Apart from some new interfaces for the new Steam functionality, Vilya has been continuing her work on future portions of the game! Below is the portrait of a young kid who’s going to play a rather important role in events to come (and has come to pass):

Here’s also one of the rooms she’s been working on for the area(s) where said boy will appear:

She also started working on a new piece of promotional artwork, which will serve as our banner(s) on Steam, as well as replace the current character art on the from page of this website! Stay tuned for the finished version of that in next week’s recap :D

Way back, before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we used to have a crafting tab in the inventory, from which all your crafting needs were carried out. Things changed, and instead crafting was to be handled at the different shops in town.

Looking back, this was a rather misguided decision, and so we’ll bring crafting back into the menu!

Instead of the old interface used in the shops, we’re using the layout previously found when looking at recipes via your inventory. The tradeoff is that you can’t display as many items at once, but a clear benefit is that much more information is available at first glance!

You can now see what type of item it is, and the exact ingredients required directly in the list. By pressing right or left, you can also cycle through the ingredients to see their description, stats and how many you own. Oh, and if you still prefer to find recipes through the inventory (by selecting an ingredient), you can craft from there as well!

With this change, we’ll also add a feature we’ve promised for a while now, namely the ability to track crafting recipes:

When tracking a recipe, it will appear where you’d normally see your tracked quest, allowing you to see your progress without needing to visit the menu. You can still cycle through your active quests like normal using TAB (or RB/R1 on controllers); the tracked recipe will behave just like another quest.

With this, the shopkeepers will lose their crafting licenses and can only Buy/Sell. Let’s hope they don’t go out of business! :C

First off, we’d like to remind everyone that the talent system is now live in the Frontline beta! So jump in there and test them out. Some systems have been slightly reworked or extended to facilitate some of the Talent effects, so the potential for amazing bugs is vast! Upon loading an old character, all skill points will auto-refund and adapt to the new system.

Another new addition in this update is the ability to refund skill points! This is something that has been suggested and discussed for a long time now, and it has never been an extremely prioritized topic (partly because of the /respec cheat already in game). With the advent of Talents, however, we decided to test this feature out.

For a fair bit of gold, you can refund a skill point you might have misplaced or began to regret! The cost scales with level (currently 100 gold per level gained), so it should always be a cost that stings at least a bit.

Oh, and something you might’ve noticed just from looking at the screenshot above: we’re removing a charge level from all active spells. There are three reasons behind this.

For one, finding openings for charging up is hard as it is, and will only get harder as you gain more charge levels. Having three charge upgrades instead of four helps a bit in this regard. This is probably the smallest issue, even.

Another reason is that having five different charges makes for a pretty awkward power curve. Preferably, the Silver, Gold and Ultimate charges would all need to be significant upgrades compared to their previous charge level. This meant the Gold charge would have to be “really cool but not too cool since we must add a fifth power level after it”.

What we’ll do now is that you just skip that step, and will get the best version of the skill at level 10 (which will be acquired at character level 19 with the current system).

Finally, we acknowledge that it would probably technically be possible to get the five step power curve to feel alright, but we always have to keep in mind the development time (including testing and balance revisions).

We doubt very much that the previous Gold charge would have added a ton compared to “just” having four charge levels, but it would mean many hours of brain storming, animating, implementation and tuning.

(Please note that we’ve still not implemented the final charge! This will probably come after the next temple is in the game)

This week, as you can probably imagine, we’ve been pretty busy with preparing for the upcoming pre-order! We just updated the beta with what we hope will turn out to be a stable build we can use for the pre-order launch.

Besides all the administrative work (setting humble widgets up, making the pre-order site, etc), we’ve still hammered away quite a bit on the game! For one, we’ve added a new little main quest to the Pumpkin Woods, to make players experience the atmosphere a bit more before moving on to the temple. If you’re in the beta and have som spare time, please try the quest out and share your thoughts on the forums! It’s supposed to be played between the exams and the first temple, story wise.

We’ve also worked a bit on removing some player confusion. First off, pets now have a small aura so they can be distinguished from their bloodthirsty, farmable counterparts:

We tried to keep it subtle yet noticable, so you’ll
know what cute things to murder!

Another thing that wasn’t all that clear to player is that you can jump down certain ledges! To help with this, we’ve added small arrows that appear when you get close to a ledge from which you can jump down. If this doesn’t work, we’ll probably have to implement escalators instead.

Wait, how did he get up there without turning off the bullets?!

Apart from this, Vilya has kept on updating portraits to the new style! Here are a couple of them, step by step:

As for Fred, he’s been working on some juicy animations for the new quest as well as the enemies of the Season Change Temple, who are slowly but surely being brought to life! The knight has taken its first steps while the Wizard is doing his best not using feet at all.

With the beta now up and running on Steam, feedback and bug reports have been flowing in like never before, to Teddy’s combined delight and despair! In times like these, the ability to quickly roll out patches on Steam really shines. In fact, it’s so easy to update that a better way of delivering patch notes was in order. As such, one of the week’s additions to the game is an in-game patch note viewer!

Whenever the game has updated and there’s new patch notes, a notice will appear on the start menu informing you about this. By pressing Tab, you can access all recorded patch notes.

The game records when you played it last, and if you have missed more than one update, you’ll have an option to aggregate the patches. This will create a combined patch note showing every addition, change and bug fix in all patch notes since the last time you played, allowing you to catch up easily!

Fred has stepped away from the flavor and NPC-crafting (for now) and started working on some new enemies. Below are some of the enemies that will pop up in the upcoming Season Change Temple (working title).

Like the name implies, changing seasons will be the main focus of the Season Change Temple. Player will be able to change season between Fall, Winter and Summer (spring is excluded for a reason!) with each season affecting the dungeon both visually and gameplay wise.

The season change-ability will be the main ingredient of the puzzles of the dungeon, but it will also effect the enemies within it. As seen above, every enemy comes in 3 different versions that each represents a different season. For example, changing the season to Summer will boost the stats of all summer enemies as well as allow them to use certain skills. The same goes for the other seasons!

To round things up, here’s the idle animation for the Summer Knight!