This week has been quite busy! It’s only been a few days since the SGA deadline now, for which we finished up and tested the co-op feature like there was no tomorrow. While that was our big focus of the week, we also managed to improve some of the old portraits:

These portraits have actually made quite the journey to get to this point. Here’s a pic showing how they improved since the first version:

Kind of make you wonder how different they will be once the game is done. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last iteration just yet!

Other than that, we also added a couple of animations for the people in Evergrind City, to make the area feel a little more alive:

Now, wish us luck with SGA! Nominees should be announced in the next couple of days :)

GGC may be done and over with, but there’s still one big event to go! The SGA deadline is this Thursday, so there’s no rest in sight just yet. We’re currently spending most of our time hunting bugs in the multiplayer feature, but since that isn’t particularly exciting to look at we’ll show you some things we recently finished in time for GGC instead:

First of all, we decided to let one of our main characters, your irreplaceable friend the Bag, handle the gameplay hints:

Click it!

The hint box will appear when the Bag feels like there’s something you should know. For instance how a new item works, how to best defeat special enemies, when you’re heading in the wrong direction, and so on. You will be able to move freely while it’s there, so it won’t interrupt your battle or exploration like talking to a normal NPC would.

Another thing we added right before GGC was Signposts:

Click it!

As you can see, there’s no plain text going on here! We thought it would be more interesting and visually pleasing to use images instead. What do you think?

The signpost graphics will also appear automatically when you come close to a sign, and will disappear once you move away from it – so your hands are free here as well!

Speaking of visually pleasing, we also started working on a new portrait style with the feedback we received on the old ones in mind. Here’s a couple of the newcomers:

Hopefully you like these better, as we do. If not, let us know! We always appreciate the feedback, especially on such important matters as the portraits which will appear a lot in the game.

Last but not least, Evergrind is now almost fully populated! After you beat the Exam you may now explore the city and talk to its current inhabitants. At the moment we haven’t put in any shops, but they are well underway as well.

Click it!

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have some bugs to hunt! ;3

This week we have worked on many different areas of the game! We’re currently trying to tie everything together for our long-awaited beta (sorry about that!), so chances are the coming updates will keep on being little bit all over the place.

What we can show you from the skill area are these two skills, animated by Fred:

(Click for larger version!)

This is the Earth Spike spell! This is part of an experiment we’re having with targeted spells.

As you charge the spell, you will gain control of a small target circle, and when you release the button the spell will be cast at that location. The circle has a limited range, and cannot pass through walls (although it can pass through small obstacles like trees or rocks).

We wanted to at least try it out, since we felt a new type of spell casting would be awesome for the game’s variety. It actually works pretty well! The challenge comes with trying to balance out the high accuracy.

The new charging system is also shown in the gif! Being a ranged spell with high mobility, the charge time of Earth Spike is pretty high. Level 1 and 2 looks the same, but level 2 will knock enemies up and stun them, opening them up for attack or giving the player time to reposition. Level 3 upgrades all aspects, with more damage, larger area of effect and longer stun. Notice how the rabbit is easily comboed with the mace due to the knockup and stun! Be careful, though, because heavy enemies can’t be knocked up.

This second spell is a typical Speed Up spell, which will increase your attack- and cast speed for a limited time. Great for when you’re in a hurry!

Other than spells we also worked on a feature that I don’t think has been mentioned yet: Cards!

Every enemy you kill will have a low chance of dropping a card like the one above. These cards will each give you a slight passive boost, which means collecting them all would improve your character by quite a bit!

They will also feature a portrait of the enemy that dropped it (pictured above is, as you might have guessed, the Green Slime Card) and will be viewable from the Card Album menu at any time.

Lastly, we have some fresh new portraits added this week:

Not much to say there. :) See you next week!

We all like flashy things, and there is no better way to start off a fancy boss fight than with a fancy introduction! This week, one of the things we’ve worked on is this flash screen, which will introduce your enemy every time shit is about to hit the fan:

As you can see (if you remember our old post) we have reworked the look of this scary boss! This also includes new portraits:

We’ve also been messing around with the idea of changing up how skills work, and after some time in the design dungeon, we’ve decided to give it a shot.

Most skills will now be able to be charged into flashier and more powerful versions by holding down the button. The charge time differs between spells depending on how limiting this extra delay would be for its usability, as well as how powerful the upgrades are. Our main reason for this change is to give players greater variety and involvement in the combat.

Initially, only two charge levels are available, but as you add points in a skill you unlock more charge tiers. Most offensive skills will have five of them!

Below are the animations and effects for the fireball charge, as well as the projectile sprite for level 1-2, 3 and 4:

The fifth level is not yet done, but we promise to crank the fanciness up to max for all top level spells!

Next week: More spells, portraits and… cards!

So the time is closing in for us to say farewell to the Halloween forest. Although it has been a lot of fun to do something new and exciting, all the props have been made and now only detail work (like actually putting it all together in the game) remains. Last week was spent mostly on that note on the programming and animation side and will probably continue on like that during this one.

While we’re shifting our main focus from the Halloween Forest in order to connect it to the rest of the game, we’ll try to set some time aside to record a gameplay video of us fighting inside it some time in the coming weeks!

Vilya’s final stretch in the forest was to make these portraits:

These are the NPCs you will encounter along the forest! Who they are? Remains for you to find out!

What we’ll do after this (and which Vilya has already gotten into, as you will soon see) is to return to the city of Evergrind, filling it with indoor designs and people. We’re also gonna look into adding more skills and expand our menu and level system in the near future, so look forward to that in the coming weeks!

Before that, however, here’s a sneak peek of two buildings that will be featured in Evergrind:

This is the Dojo, a place ruled by a great master of all fighting styles. Perhaps he can show you a new trick or two?

Another way to learn different types of tricks is to attend school:

Here you can learn details about monster types and other helpful hints and strategies that will make your grinding life easier.

Next Week: More indoory stuff for Evergrind, and tying up som loose ends of our good foresty friend

Hello again and welcome to another weekly recap!

But wait, you say, it’s not Friday today… No, indeed, here in Sweden it’s currently Monday evening, and as we already mentioned over at Facebook and Google+ last week (sadly, we forgot about Twitter..), we are rescheduling our future updates to Mondays from now on.

The reason is simply that we have changed our workflow and made stricter schedules for each of us, listing the tasks we need to do each week. Since we all enjoy working on the game during the weekends we also thought Mondays would be a better time to show the progress. That way we can show the tasks we finished during our scheduled week, including the things we saved for the weekend!

Anyway, let’s forget about that now and focus on what’s important: the update!

This week, Vilya spent making another zone, the east outskirts of the city. There’s a mysterious pond, a river and a house you won’t reach just yet.. ;3

To make the environment look better, and to avoid people getting hidden behind trees too often, we decided to create bushes to scatter around the areas. These will replace most of the random trees standing in the middle of any area so you won’t get caught by a naughty enemy hiding behind them.

Fred has been really busy this week. So busy, that he managed to complete all the tasks for next week, this week! Wooho!
Walk animations for a bunch of different NPCs was one of the tasks this week, so here’s a few of them in action paired together with some updated portraits by Vilya!

Writing and reading dialogues in XML-format was becoming quite impractical, especially for the artists. When the implementation workload let up a bit, Teddy whipped up a simple tool that made the process much less painful! The tool is made in good old C#/Winforms.

Next week: Being dead and waiting for revival in a multiplayer game is no fun. We’ll look into ways of making death (or being dead) a bit less boring!

Another week, another update! We’re now halfway through December and everyone is counting the days left before christmas. Here at the Secrets of Grindea office we keep pressing on while dreaming of the traditional swedish christmas cuisine.. :3

This week Vilya made even more portraits! She also revised some of them, and revisions will keep being made throught the entire production. Here’s an example of changes being made on the go, as well as a few of the new faces:

Better? We think so!

She also started making a few props that will appear inside one of the buildings in town. A few weapon stands, for example:

Besides adding some new stuff to the super secret first boss, Fred has been swinging away at some new skills and NPC sprites!

This here is one of the early skills from the one handed weapons skill tree (we have 8 trees in total). We haven’t got a proper name for it yet, but it plunges the hero forward damaging anything in it’s path. Range and damage increases by leveling it up.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Treasures, puzzles, fight!
Only the best are chosen.
Are you strong enough?”

[Teddy has mostly been laying the foundations for the spectacular trials! For the puzzle part, a few more puzzles were created to ease new players into it!]

Next Week: Merry Christmas!

This week Vilya spent doing no less than 29 portraits for different NPCs! Some of them you’ll see below – who do you think they are?

She also made these market stands where you’ll be able to get a variety of special items! The character sprites were made by Fred afterwards – can you pair them up with the correct face above?

Fred has been battling a vicious cold and has been out of action for a big chunk of the week :C

Besides doing the market NPCs above, he has been able to squeeze in most of the animations needed for our treasure system! We’ll post a video about it once we got it all set up, in the mean time you will have to settle for some animations off the main character digging up some treasure.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Sounds of moving earth.
Ancient ink will guide your steps.
Let the hunt begin!”

[A basic sound system is in place, as well as a system for finding maps which leads to buried treasures to use that slick digging animation on!]

Next Week: The portraits start getting matching NPC-sprites and Vilya visits her parents! Teddy takes on the trial of setting up the trials!

This week Vilya worked on the arena which now is in waiting-mode while Fred takes care of the next step! It is almost done, but need some tweaking and of course an excited crowd to watch your trials.

While waiting, she spent her time making portrait for a cutscene involving the first mini-boss battle, a mean bandit leader and her two thugs.

Next thing she went on doing was small props to be placed all around the city. Many more to come, of course:

Fred has spent some time adding a few flavor animations to the bandit gang, this here showing one of the thugs cheering on as the leader fights the player/players!

But mostly he has been busy with bringing the first boss to life! Even though being sick (damn you Vilya!) he has been able to finish up most of the animations, with just a couple left to clean up!

We don’t want to spoil all the fun by revealing too much about the bosses yet, so you guys will have to settle with this for now! Who’s that pokemon!?

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Written destiny,
even Escape brings same end:
The Wobbling Giant.”

[I have made some in-game cutscenes, and also implemented the first ‘real’ boss. Of course, unlike in some games (looking at you Tales of Vesperia), you can press escape during a cutscene to skip it!]

Next week: The city keeps growing and the first NPCs moves in! Also, treasure hunting (for real this time!)