We’re quite overwhelmed (and humbled) by the great reception of the video we posted last week. Most people seemed positively surprised at the combat system currently in place! There’s a couple of other subject we’d love to do spotlights on, so if we can find the time, expect some more videos in the future! :)

Now, let’s talk about the new things we’ve got to show this week. First off, we put the stylist to work! After months of just looking pretty in his booth, you can finally visit him to change your appearance.

You can both change hairstyle, or dye your hair or any of your clothes. Getting a haircut costs money, but changing colors is free!

Both getting a haircut and changing the color of something is a pretty straightforward affair, and you’re able to see the end results by looking at the preview to the right!

Apart from ending Franciscos welfare run, we also added something that’s been a long time coming: achievements! In the game, we call them ”trophies”, because we’re crazy like that.

The basic system probably doesn’t need an explanation, but here it is anyway: it’s a series of challenges geared towards obsessive people like ourselves. Usually though, most games give the player a nice sound, a pop-up and an entry somewhere and call it a day. We wanted to add something extra, and so every achievement comes with some form of reward.

Also, we have plans for some kind of housing system, where some achievements will give you actual trophies or decorations to put on display there! More on that when it actually exists…

Let’s stay true to tradition and finish the recap off with an animation! This time, it’s a new one handed weapon, The Stinger (quite literally)!

Tomorrow we’ll set up a way for you to register for the beta launch!

Stay tuned!

Settling on a difficulty for a game is tough. We’re not making Super Meat Boy, where difficulty is a major selling point, but we don’t want to make the game a casual stroll in the park either.

What we’re going for now is tough for a casual player and challenging for an average player, but probably a tad bit too easy for hardcore gamers.

In order to add some extra mileage for those wanting to push their characters to the limit without putting huge road blocks in front of “normal” players, we added a feature to the arena called Challenges!

At the top level, you can select between Challenges and Versus.

Challenges are just that. Designed trials where your performance will be graded! In multiplayer, you’ll cooperate in these.

Versus is a collection of mini games where you can challenge your friends to a farm-off, the noble art of chicken herding and other wacky mini games! We might cover this in more detail some other time.

In the Challenge menu, you’ll see a list of all unlocked challenges, together with your current best grade (the grades go from ‘C’ to ‘S’). You’ll unlock more challenges as you progress through the story!

Most challenges will be tied to the combat mechanics of the game. For example, you might fight through waves of difficult enemy constellations, or battle a nightmare version of a boss!

When you’ve completed the challenge, you’ll get to see a scoreboard with your grades!

When you return to the arena reception, you’ll receive different items depending on what grade you got. Whenever you beat a challenge on S-rank for the first time, you’ll be rewarded with a unique item!

To move on to a completely different subject, we’re going to do the unthinkable and actually posting some info regarding the beta!

A while back we contacted Steam to see if we could run the beta on their platform. This was just before them announcing Greenlight, and as such, six weeks later we received a template reply telling us to check that service out.

Now, Greenlight seems great. However, it isn’t launching until the end of August (+Valve Time?), and there’s also no way of guessing right now how much Greenlight interest we must garner before being put on Steam, and how happy they are with indies prancing around running betas on there. While our skill at postponing betas is at Olympic level, even we didn’t want to delay it indefinitely!

So, we couldn’t do Steam, but we still wanted some centralized platform with automatic patching and ability to select users to invite. An indie friendly alternative to Steam that does just this is Desura.

Desura is pretty similar to Steam in many ways, and should be a pretty familiar experience for most players used to Valve’s platform. We’ve set up an IndieDB-page for the game in preparation. This is probably also where we’ll open up forums for our beta testers!

The beta isn’t running quite yet, but as you can tell things are moving along! We still have a few things to throw into the mix as far as the game goes. In the coming few weeks, we’ll give you more detailed information on how to register for the beta (we don’t know yet :D ), and shortly after that we’ll be throwing out the invites!

Wow, today’s post became really long… glad you made it to the end! See you next week! :)

This week we’ve implemented a couple of quests, and as a part of that, we also created a quest tracker! It’s nothing too fancy, and does pretty much what you’d expect.

When you’re looking at the list of active quests, you can press Tab to focus the tracker on that quest. Yes, this particular quest is an old fashioned “fetch quest”. We’re showing it here because it demonstrates the quest tracker well. Don’t worry, we’ll have other types of quests, too! :)

When tracked, a shortened version of the objectives will be stickied to the top right corner of the screen, which helps a lot in these types of quests. We’ll probably enable tracking for crafting recipes as well, so you can keep a list of ingredients on screen while farming!

Apart from creating the GUI for quest tracking, Vilya keeps up with the tradition of handing out portraits to the poor!

Here’s a sprite of the guy on the bottom left made by Fred:

One of the few problems with a magic bag full of loot is figuring out what to do with all your junk. Luckily, there is a great remedy for this issue: turning your junk into new kinds of junk, also known as crafting!

In Grindea, you can visit certain NPCs which will help you craft items close to their expertise. Mr Fabulous, the Evergrind hatter, will let you craft hats for example.

The screenshot above is the crafting view at his shop. You don’t need to unlock recipes in order to craft stuff. Instead, any recipe with at least one item that you already own will appear in the list. The little bar below the item icon is an indicator on how close you are to being able to craft this item! If you don’t have enough ingredients to craft an item, it will show up only as a silhouette. When you’ve gathered all the items required, the bar will turn green and the real icon will appear.

When you press on an item, you will be able to view more detailed information of what the ingredients are, how many you need, and how many you own of each ingredient. Of course, you can view this information even if you haven’t collected all the ingredients yet! If you have all the required parts, you can craft the item. In this case, a sweet slime hat!

Another crafting feature we implemented at the same time was the ability to browse recipes based on ingredient directly from your inventory!

When you press on an item that’s a part of any recipe, you’ll get an option called “Recipes”. Selecting this option will take you to a nifty little recipe browser, listing all items in the game that can be created using that particular item.

Note that even if you don’t have all the ingredients for an item, you can still see what type it is, as well as what stats it will have when you craft it. We don’t want players to farm blindly for an hour to make a new sword, only to find out that the weapon they had used to bash all those slimes had been better all along!

(…of course, a true collector will want to craft everything just for the bragging rights) :3

Crafting, like much else, is not mandatory in order to complete the main story. Neither will it be a breaking powergaming feature like in some modern RPGs, where crafting makes even the rarest of unique drops obsolete. We’ll try to create a balance where both crafted equipment and rare gear are equally powerful. Now, if you craft something from the rarest of components, however…

We heard you liked this journal, so we put our journal in our journal so you can…

Seriously, though, this blog post will be about the Journal Screen of the game menu! It’s designed to be your one stop shop for the administrative part of being a collector. In the Journal, you’ll find quest logs, information about enemies and NPCs, tutorials and gameplay hints and also the most coveted collection of them all: your Card Album!

Click images to view full scale!

We touched this subject a while back, but enemy cards are super rare, unique collectibles dropped by nearly every enemy in the game. Of course, only the enemy depicted can drop that specific card!

If a card is found, it is put into your Card Album, which is separate from your inventory. Cards cannot be sold or traded, so they are the true testament to your farming prowess! Each card in the game also have a different passive effect.

An effect can either be a small boost to a stat, or have a more advanced effect, such as the Green Slime Card in the screens above. They are usually not extraordinary on their own, but if you manage to get a sizable collection, the combined effect will be quite powerful!

On the topic of enemies, another cool feature of the Journal is the Enemy Codex:

In the Enemy Codex, you can find out more about enemies you’ve encountered! You can find lore and basic stats regarding each enemy, and sometimes useful hints on how to defeat them.

The arguably most useful thing about the Enemy Codex for the completionist, however, is the list of all drops that is available next to each discovered enemy’s name! Items you’ve owned at some point are lit up, while undiscovered items are darkened. This lets you know if an enemy type has dropped all it can, or if there might be reason to stay a while and get your grind on!

Lastly, let’s cover a more classic part of journals, the Quest Log:

This quest is so unique we’re considering trademarking it

There isn’t that much to say about the Quest Log! It basically tracks the progress of your active quests, and serve as an archive for your completed ones! If you’re ever stuck on some quest, consulting your Quest Log will probably help you out.

Wow, that was quite an exhausting post. Hope you found it interesting! Next week, we’ll hopefully have finished our fishing minigame!

At the end of last week we’ve finally established a little bit of order again. We spent that time implementing shops, so players can finally spend all those coins (or crafting ingredients) they keep finding!

This particular shop is Mr. Fab’s Fabulous Hats, where you can satisfy your vanity with some fancy headgear! Of course, the selection of all the shops will expand as the game progresses. If you’re having terrible luck with getting sweet drops, going to Evergrind and throwing some cash at the problem is a good backup plan!

Also, heads up for followers who might be in Stockholm this coming Wednesday! We’ll be showing the game off at the Central Station from around 8 – 16 (8AM – 4PM), together with lots of other sweet games that made it to the Swedish Game Awards finals!

Another week has rushed past, and the battle with the GUI continues! We’re pretty much wrapping up the main menu, and are moving on to in-game stuff. Due to our passionate and undying love for interface work, we also decided to redesign how keyboard vs. controller works in the game.

But let’s get the main menu out of the way, first!

Click image to enlarge!

This here is the multiplayer lobby! Players can gather there before starting a game, and adjust a couple of multiplayer settings. Of course, if you don’t like waiting for that dude who’s just gonna “grab a sandwich or something”, you can start the game and have your friends connect to you while you’re playing!

The first option you have is Item Share. It can be set to either Each Take, where all items go to whatever player that picks them up, or Round Robin, which distributes items fairly and randomly.

Secondly we have Mentorship, which if turned on will synchronize the combat efficiency of all characters to roughly the same level as the lowest leveled character. This is useful for players who want to play together, but haven’t gotten equally far into the game. Instead of having to start over from the beginning, they can play from where the lower leveled player is in the story without the higher leveled one wreaking havoc and potentially ruin the experience for his friend.

That sums up the lobby pretty well, so let’s head on to the HUD-changes by showing two screens of the different setups:

Gamepad HUD

Keyboard HUD

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally decided to completely separate the control schemes for keyboard and gamepads. Up until now, we’ve had emulator-like controls on the keyboard, which worked sort of well, but certainly not as well as it could. This meet-halway-there approach limited our options with the controller as well, so this was the right thing to do.

The new keyboard HUD looks and works similar to modern RPGs and MMOs, where you have a bar with abilities which you activate with hotkeys (which you can bind however you want — in the picture I’ve used keys close to those I use for the sword and shield). You can have up to ten quickslots set at a time, and a quickslot can contain either a skill, a consumable item or a weapon.

The gamepad HUD looks like it used to, and also has ten quickslots. The first two can be used by just pressing a button, and two sets of four more quickslots can be accessed by holding the left or the right trigger before pressing the button. We might do a video of this later to show it in action.

Luckily, it’s not all GUIs in ferretland. Fred has spent some time making a few cool, new weapons for players to use!

Next Week: Even moar GUI-work! Woohoo! Fred will be making the rest of the animations for our new weapons

Hello and happy valentines day to everyone (one day early, but hey)!
Sadly(?), today’s update does not have a lot to do with romance. Instead, we focus on character creation, since it has been our main focus this week!

The week started off with Vilya creating and later adjusting haircuts together with Fred. A few mishaps later they ended up spending almost three entire days (not even kidding) adjusting clothing colors. Imagine how tired they are of that by now!

In the end everything turned our quite well though! We currently have 30 different clothing colors (per item) to pick from and 8 different haircuts per gender. There will be more as we move on though, so fear not! Hopefully you will all have a favorite style before we’re done with the game ;3

Anyway, there really isn’t much more to say. Instead, have a look at this video with commentary by Fred, which shows everything you need to know about the character creation:

Other than that, a lot of you guys asked us about the beta last week and how to get into it. Because we wanna start off small, we’ll begin with inviting people we know and have worked with previously. After that, we’ll expand more and include people from outside our circles. When the time is near we’ll let you know of a way to sign up, don’t worry!

Next week: We remake the GUI for keyboard users and add more skills!