While there were certainly a bunch of you who liked having HD portraits, the majority seemed to prefer the portraits matching the native in-game resolution. We wanted to keep the new look, though, so Vilya made a down scaled version, which can be seen below. We’re quite happy with how it turned out!

Some of you were concerned about the portrait and sprite not matching each other. Don’t fret! This blonde young guy isn’t your father, but a fellow collector :)

Here’s a little teaser gif from when you beat a floor in the Roguelike! Your performance is graded, and you’re given a large score bonus based on how well you played, and how many rooms you braved. This is for the first floor, which explains the relatively few rooms.

The quest for the flavor animations is an ongoing and seemingly endless task, but Fred keeps hammering away at it. The Collector’s HQ has been the main focus this week as well, but some of the local Evergrind residents have also been given some love.

This week we’ve kept on working on getting things in order – fixing bugs, adjusting levels and implementing the new animations and interfaces.

We’ve also been discussing the portraits (yes, again!). This time around we’re toying with the idea of keeping the high-res versions of the portraits in the game rather than making them more pixelated, which proved quite a challenge when it comes to keeping all of the details.

Nothing has been decided yet as all our options each have their own issues and advantages, but here’s a mockup of what it might look like with the high-res portraits in the game:

(Click image for full size)

What do you guys think? Is it too distracting to have a high-res portrait among the rest of the pixel art, or do you prefer to see the characters in this form, which is more detailed compared to the old portraits?

In the animation department we’ve noticed that the Collectors’ Headquarters have been in grave need of some extra flare for a while and we figured it’s finally time to start correcting that! We really want to give the HQ a busy feel, so Fred have been bashing away at some minor flavor animations to liven up the place:

We’ve also got some news regarding the game outside of our workroom! It seems like we’ll be going to Gamex again this year, so if you’re near Stockholm/Kista at the end of October, be sure to visit us there!

This week, the yeti marks the end of enemy design with a slam, and we’ve also made a quick redesign of the main character’s dad:

Apart from asset creation, we’ve also brainstormed quite a bit regarding replayability. The endgame content of Grindea has always been an important part for us, and we want players to have a ton of stuff to strive for after the main story has been completed. One of our endgame features has been something we call Endless Tower, in which players will fight through an seemingly endless amount of rooms filled with different enemy composition. The difficulty increases by each passing room, as does the rewards for completing them.

While discussing this feature, we realized in how many ways this was similar to a classic rogue-like, and began exploring how the idea might be turned into a separate game mode. Players would need to fight through floors consisting of a number of different rooms, each room being filled with enemies, traps, puzzles or other tasks for the players to complete. The floor layouts would be randomly generated each play through, making every session unique.

This mode would also feature permadeath, meaning if you die once your character will be gone forever. You will start every play through with a new level 1 character, so you won’t have to worry about killing of your regular, uber-farmed characters. Since this mode is meant to be played during short sessions we will adjust a lot of the droprates to better fit the fast paced action. Gear and cards will drop a lot more frequently, while the health orbs might be more rare!

There are many good reasons to add this mode. Since we already have the Endless Tower planned and we’ll use the same enemies and environments as the fully hand crafted story mode, adding it will require very little development time while providing a huge boost to the replayability. If we ever decide to open the game up for pre order early-access, it would also be a good way to give early adopters something to entertain themselves with between patches.

If any of you rogue-like fans out there have any additional ideas, feel free to let us know through the comments! We’re always interested in hearing your feedback :)

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:

Vilya has kept busy with some more portraits this week. These two sparkling looking fellows below are two of the Fae elders, there are four of them in total. They all represent one season each, can you guess which?

Since we’re starting to have quite a few characters in the game now, we’ve been considering ways to make it visually clear who are more important than others. As a result we’ll most likely go over the portraits once more and make the main characters stand out a bit more in terms of detail and design, and, on the other end, make sure that the lesser characters aren’t too fancy.

While this revamp will probably have to wait until the last stages of development we’re definitely keeping this in mind for our future character designs, and have already done so in regards of the Fae: while the two Fae’s pictured above are important to the storyline and the Fae society in general, there two are not:


How do you feel about us differentiating main character vs filler/sidequest characters this way?

We’ve seen many different methods used in games, all ranging from side characters not having portraits at all, to letting them be extremely drab or even have the same 4-5 portraits reused for all characters that aren’t important to the plot. At the moment we think what we mentioned above is the best way for our game, but we’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!

Fred on the other hand has been busy with some outside projects. Below is the final assignment for an animation course he has been taking the last few months! It’s a bit choppy at times due to some exporting issues from Flash, but we hope you’ll enjoy it in spite of that :)

Be prepared for some glorious Grindea animations when the game is closing in on release!

This week, we’ll take a first glance at a less dangerous part of the Winterland, a yet to be namned village area!

This place is inhabited by the race of Faes. Despite being about as tall as an apple, they play a pretty major role in the world of Grindea.

Below is a screenshot of the village, as well as a portrait and some sprites of its tiny population.

Staying with the winter stuff, Teddy has been adding a bit more flair to the area by putting together some weather effects. No winter area is complete with a proper snow effect after all!

Click the image to view the animation

This week we’ve continued on our different paths. Vilya has continued with the snow area, creating a bunch of fishes for you to catch:

There’s also two more portraits to see:

Can you guess who they are..? ;)

Next up for Vilya is making a new village, hidden among the snowy trees with some quite interesting inhabitants… More on that later!

Fred, on the other hand, has started on something new: more skills! We want all skills in the game to be unlocked on level one – and we still have a long way to go before that’s achieved – but as of this week we’re a little closer!

Here’s the new skills:

This skill is part of the fire tree and calls forth a flaming meteor from the skies and deal aoe damage.

Here’s a second earth skill with whom you’ll summon plants that will help you fight!

We’ve also sent out requests to our sound designers for more sound effects so that we can get that promised video rolling as soon as possible. How long it takes largely depends on how long it takes before we receive the sounds though, so hang in there!

This week, we’ll simply distract you with some art while we finish off a couple of more quests for you to enjoy in that legendary beta…! ;3

Fred’s main focus this week has been revisiting our beloved Evergrind City and creating more flavor animations for the people living there.

And Vilya has finally finished remaking the portraits!

We’re celebrating that by starting some new interface work that you’ll hopefully be able to see next time :)

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:

Here’s the death animation for another enemy from our beloved Pumpkin Forest, this time it’s the Scarecrow’s turn to bite the dust.

Besides keeping up with the death animations from last week, Fred took the time to work on the sprite for a new enemy in the game. Aside from being cute and round, this fierce piggy will have the ability to charge the player with incredible force, not even stopping when smashing into the otherwise very useful shield!

Above is a patchwork of the different iterations he went through before we settled on a little more juicy version. The last three are different color variations of the same sprite. Since we already have another brown cuddly creature hanging around in the same area (the Rabby) we figured it would be good to separate them a bit from each other! We might still go with brown and just not have Rabbys and boars in the same zone, though.

Meanwhile, Vilya has been going strong in her portrait factory: