Aaaand we return, slightly more well rested and ready to get back into the action!

Now that the desert and desert town is in place, it’s time to update the world map into a somewhat final version (there’s still the ghost ship remaining, but I’ll easily be able to add that later, as it’s in the midst of the water anyways)!!

Let’s take a look:

 

 

 

So basically, this is what the world map will look like after you’ve visited all of the areas (except the ghost ship):

So exciting! Only one more little ship to add, and then it’s all done. I’ve reworked the shadows that covers each area before you’ve explored it slightly as well, so you’ll notice things will look a bit different once this has been implemented. There will be 12 pieces to uncover in total, once the ghost ship has been added (13 if you count Tai Ming – but the Tai Ming piece of the map isn’t visible at all until you’ve actually been there). Right now I think there are a couple more than that since we wanted to make sure we had space for the areas we hadn’t designed yet, and their shapes look a little random. The water will be visible from the start, giving the map some more color from the beginning, as well.

Exciting times! This actually feels like such a huge milestone, even if the ghost ship is missing. I mean, even if the ship is missing – it looks complete on a whole different level compared to before. It’s been a long journey, but you can finally start to see it all coming together!

Speaking of the ghost ship, we’ve been making a ton of prototypes for various challenges and mechanics we’d like to include. First we have a challenge where you need to go between various platforms, and the only way of doing so is entering the spirit world. Only problem is, there’s an angry ghost attacking you if you enter his domain – so you can’t stay too long or you’ll take guaranteed damage.

We’re currently considering whether you’ll fall down if you leave the spirit world in the midst of a bridge. The other idea would be that you simply can’t leave until you’re on solid ground.

Next, a variation on the same theme. Here we have a prototype where you battle enemies in the ‘real’ world, in which you do less damage than you normally would on a similar enemy. Entering the spirit world, you do full damage, but you also get chased by the angry ghost from before! Decisions, decisions…

Finally, and old classic we’d like to include somehow: the good old phase shift puzzle – ghost version. Here, you need to swap between the spirit world and normal world on the fly (ha!), in order to make your way across.

As for the overall design of the place, we’ve decided on dividing the ship in three parts. The first part will be where you first meet the ghost captain, and where you’ll get the skill that allows you to enter the spirit world. This part of the ship will be mostly storage, so there will be rooms with lots of crates, barrels, buckets and other kinds of storage. The ship will have had lots of cool cargo, so hopefully we’ll be able to make this part look interesting.

The second part (and second floor) will house the living quarters for the sailors that ran the ship. Here we’ll have their sleeping quarters (great halls with many beds), a kitchen, dining hall, and such. There might also be one or two optional friendly ghosts here, who might give you a quest or two.

On the third floor will be a more luxe area: here they’ll have a grand entertainment hall with a bar and ghastly piano playing by itself, there will be huts for high paying passengers, and finally, the path to the captains own room…

We’ve also talked about adding another type of “enemy” (sketched above), which you actually won’t be able to kill! These things are in fact armors that were part of a shipment, which have now been possessed. So long as you’re in the regular world, they’ll just lie on the floor blocking your way – but once you enter the spirit world, the armors will come to life and float in to the air towards you. If they get too close, they’ll attack, but you won’t be able to damage them back. Instead, your only option is to leave the spirit world and have them fall back unto the ground – a mechanic that might also be helpful in certain puzzles…

On a similar note, during these talks we’ve decided that the long you are in the spirit world, the more ghostly it becomes. As such, spending a long time in the spirit world will cause shadowlike arms or spikes appear out of walls or even the floor, damaging and slow you as you go. If you’ve spent a long time in the spirit world, you might even begin to see hints of these things in the regular world as well…

Now, over to something else, such as this week’s portrait! This time it features the pianist, a guy who, as you may have guessed, plays the piano (in the saloon, the be specific). Since he’s in the saloon I went with the theme and made him sort of buff looking. Otherwise not much else to say about this guy for now!

WIP:

Finished sprite:

In the animation department, Fred continues with the desert stuff and has made a really cool death animation for the Solem, which kind of gets frozen in place before it disintegrates:

There’s also a lovely little salamander in progress, which we want running around the place here and there, as a purely decorative detail. Here’s a bunch of suggestions he made, with the one we ended up choosing the the red circle:

And of course, it needs a few animations as well, so here’s one where it’s sticking its tongue out, one where it runs off, and one where it escapes by digging its way into the sand – how cute!

Teddy has been hard at work implementing all of Fred’s NPCs, too, and for the fun of it he decided to put most of them in one screen, just to see what it’d look like. Have a peek:

And with that, back to work! See you next time~

With the the buildings and their corresponding mechanics fully implemented into the new, revamped Arcadia, it’s now time for the final few things we want to add before it’s time to get to testing! We’ve always planned to add more randomized event rooms, and with the rework we feel it’s a good time to add in a few of them.

Here’s the one we’ll add this time around:

Buff Shrines
A shrine that, upon approaching it, gives you a random buff for a limited time. The buffs we’ve got planned are the usual basic ones: increased attack (both magic and physical), increased cast & attack speed and increased EP regeneration. But we’ve also come up with a few less common: one that makes your shield much stronger, one that increases your movement speed, and one in which you won’t get knocked back. These last three will need to be tested to see whether they will actually be nice buffs to have in this setting, but we have our hopes up.

Grindea’s Blessings
A room with a Grindea statue that grants you permanent (as in they last until you end the run) blessings. These can be a level up, a gold skillpoint, a few talent orbs, gold, or a heal!

Shadier Merchant
A mysterious salesman who sells powerful items and skillpoints in exchange for a portion of your max HP. He’ll have three items on display each time this room appears, and depending on the item he’ll reduce your max HP by a certain number.

Little J
…will start appearing as well! First as a prisoner which you’ll need to save from a mean mini-boss, but once he’s released he’ll start appearing in shop rooms, allowing you to upgrade your bow as you progress through the floors.

We have more rooms planned as well, but for now we’ll just include the ones mentioned above (we gotta get that update out after all – we’ve been at it quite a while!) Once they are implemented we’ll only need to do some slight inhouse testing before pushing it out to frontline though, so stay tuned!

Now, with the new event rooms decided upon and fully designed, it’s time to get to making some new graphics. Or rather bringing in and adjusting some of our existing ones to fit the theme of these rooms.

First we have the Blessings of Grindea rooms, which will give permanent upgrades of various sorts (or just a simple heal). Our idea here is that the chest will open up and reveal the blessing as you receive it:

Next, Shadier merchant and his carpets. We might add some more props to this guy in the future, or maybe make him a different character entirely (a vampire, perhaps, seeing as he wants your life force ;)). For now though, he sits by a couple of torches, with each item displayed on a tiny carpet in front of him:

Finally, the buff shrines. Our idea here is that a buff icon will appear in the middle of the circle as you approach it. A strategy might be to avoid going close enough to activate the shrine until you find the boss room – but on the other hand, getting there without the buff might be hard enough! What will you do?

 

With these implemented, the Arcadia rework is more or less done (aside from some smaller polish things). Now all that remains is some inhouse testing to make sure things aren’t too buggy for the frontline users.

…and it’s a good thing we did! One of the first things we noticed was a hard to figure out bug that crashed the game every time we entered a specific type of event room. There’s also been a lot of other smaller but kind of obvious bugs that we’ve been able to clean out that definitely would impact the player experience.

Other than that though, our testing sessions have gone really well. Most things work and the main new feature (the building your town thing) feels pretty satisfying, to us at least! The whole of Arcade Mode has gotten some upgrades pacing wise, with things unlocking as you progress, which feels a lot more satisfying.

There’s still some bug hunting to do, and some smaller things to fix, but you should be able to expect the update around the 10-12th April, if things go as planned.

After several hours played we’ve far from unlocked everything, which is great. While I only get to the second floor of Evergrind and Fred gets to the later floors of the whole thing, we’ve unlocked things in approximately the same amount of time, which is as we intended.

The time it takes to get enough gold to unlock new buildings actually feels surprisingly well balanced in our opinion, but that might of course change once we upload everything to Frontline and hear more opinions!

As always when looking at something you haven’t touched for a while, there’s some eyesores. In between testing (when waiting for Teddy to upload patches with bug fixes), I went ahead and fixed a bunch of smaller things:

I forgot to draw an arrow from the old to the new money bags, but needless to say, the left one is the old and the right one is the new. The portraits have been slightly touched up. I still have a dream of going back and remaking a bunch of the older portraits one final time before we release the game properly, but for now these quick touchups will have to do :)

With this testing we’re getting closer to an actual estimate of when the Arcadia rework will go live on Frontline as well! If nothing unexpected happens, we aim to have it done around 10-12th April, basically somewhere early that week. There are still some small things we need to add or fix graphics wise, and we have a lot more systems to test as well, but this estimate includes the time we expect to spend on bug fixes.

Finally, let’s talk about one of the things Fred has been working on recently: Loods! In Arcadia, this is the name of a new feature, namely these cute little beings who appear randomly in rooms in Arcade Mode runs:

The Loods are mysterious creatures of unknown origins. Some say they are linked to the goddess Grindea in some way, but who can tell for sure? What we do know, though, is that there are several kinds of Loods in different colors, and that upon defeating a Lood, it will turn into treasure!

What kind of treasure the Lood turns into depends on what kind of Lood it is. Currently there are four known kinds who give gold, items, talent orbs and health pots respectively. Defeating them in itself won’t be too hard, since they don’t attack – the challenge lies in defeating them before they get bored and run off! As such, once a Lood spawns you have a very limited time in which you may try to defeat it to get the treasure. Fail, and it will simply leave!

Once the Lood is defeated it will turn into an idle form, which, upon room completion turns into a chest. We hope that the Loods will make Arcade runs even more interesting, as it adds a little random factor to the regular rooms. We have thoughts of including evil Loods that you need to defeat in order to be spared from something annoying as well, but we’ll see how things go with these friendly Loods first.

Can’t wait to hear your feedback on all of this once the patch goes live!

This week was a very special week, since the annual GGC was hosted (and also the week where we launched housing on frontline – go check it out)!

GGC is short for Gotland Game Conference, which is basically a game expo where the students at the game design education showcase their game and a bunch of people from the industry is invited as judges to give feedback and select which ones did the best. It all culminates in an award ceremony with an after-party where we all get a chance to hang out together and share experiences with other game developers. So basically, it’s great!

For those of you wanting a glimpse of all the game presented at the conference, check out this video:

One of the showfloor favorites, and clear winner of many of the awards at the award ceremony was this little gem called Pump the Frog, made by a bunch of first year students:

Totally charming and so well polished. It was hard to imagine they only had 8 weeks from start to finish, incredibly impressive work! It’s also nominated for several SGA (Swedish Game Awards) categories, so its success might continue on to other venues as well!

If you want to know more about the conference or would like to see some cool pictures from the showfloor and presentations, head over to the conference website!

———–

Now as I mentioned, this week we also launched the housing system, which is now playable on frontline! So, when we weren’t at GGC judging games and hanging out with fellow game developers, this week was all about some last minute housing polish, finishing up the remaining details and the graphics needed for them!

First up, we realized there were some more forgotten things we needed to take care of!

Some miniatures for the carpets from before, for example:

And then, a couple of items some of you have likely had in your inventory for quite some time! The red slime carpet and the green slime bad:

Hopefully that’s the last of our forgotten objects, and we can now focus on just adding new ones in the future :)

As for the housing system itself, the way you get the house, for now, is that once you’ve completed Flying Fortress, the scientist Kim will appear in Evergrind City next to your currently not-yet-built house, explaining one or two things about the science behind the houses in the game (and your own)!

She also wonders if you’d like to help test out some new systems, and upon agreeing to do so you’ll be able to purchase the house from the carpenter, who will build it for you. After this is done we plan to move Kim back to the lab in the HQ where she’ll continue doing other experiments (gotta keep busy, you know)!

As for the house, once it’s been finished (this happens once you change screens once), you’ll get a very short and basic explanation of how to use it upon entering the building.

We’ve continued working on the icons that illustrate what tool you’re currently using, and here they are in action:

First up, the style icon (seen above). After some thinking we’ve decided the arrows for each of the icons need to be remade, and it’s also missing a proper outline and an animation at this point.

Next, the carpet tool’s “carpet version”:

For this one we’re actually considering using the old version (seen below) after all, to make it stand out a bit more from the carpets you’re editing.

Finally, a GIF showcasing both the stack and the move tool:

The stack tool (as well as the carpet tool) don’t use the correct freeze frames in these GIFs which means the animation isn’t paced exactly right (it’s supposed to pause for longer on each stack), but it gives you an idea of what it’ll look like. The move tool is missing an animation in these GIFs as well, but it has since been added to the game. Finally, we added outlines to all the icons, which made them stand out a bit more against the background. This can also be viewed in the game.

We did have a discussion regarding whether or not to use a more simplistic style for each of these (like the old version of the carpet tool), but decided against it in the end. This way there will be a little more color, and hopefully each icon will stand out enough on their own once the outlines and proper animations have been added!

As for Fred, his main focus has been getting all those housing icon moving. Here are the finished icons he worked on:

We didn’t talk about the hand tool much in the previous post on housing, but the hand tool is a very basic tool accessible from the housing menu that allows you to move around your house and select any furniture piece you want (which in turn brings you into the other tools). The hand tool is also connected to your skin color in-game, and matches that of your character.

Here’s the new and improved move tool! We changed the arrows quite a bit, both in shape and color, plus it now moves and has an outline. It works a lot better than the old version, to say the least!

There’s also this new and improved version of the carpet tool icon (above), and the stack tool which you’ve already seen, below:

And here’s the style tool, a little bit interesting now that the brush is moving about:

Finally, Kim got a slight redesign to better resemble her portrait as well as an additional animation. In her regular one, she’s doing some chemistry stuff, mixing a liquid of some sort. While she’s outdoors telling you about the housing science, we thought we’d give her a different animation to better suit the theme (as well as one that doesn’t make sounds every few seconds):

We currently haven’t decided whether she’ll pick her chemistry set back up once she returns inside, or if she’ll continue using her newfound tablet instead!

Now, if you haven’t tried out the housing system yet, go ahead and let us know what you think! We’re eagerly awaiting your feedback :)

Over the course of the development of Secrets of Grindea, which has gone on for five (5!) years now, we’ve had many different ways of keeping track of decisions made in the past and where to head in the future.

Unfortunately they’ve varied in usefulness – turns out, simply talking about something in the group and then expecting everyone to remember the outcome of that conversation doesn’t work quite that well. In fact, more than once we’ve had the exact same conversation several times, with different outcomes, where people have changed their opinion over time, or we simply don’t remember which idea we thought was best.

To solve this we’ve used a variety of documentation methods – we’ve kept our meetings documented physically through a notebook I’ve (Vilya) brought to them, and sometimes we’ve used our “agenda” document (basically a to-talk-about list for each upcoming meeting) to document what we talked about and what it resulted in. There’s also been attempts to have a Upcoming Quests document, an Arcade Mode document (with future arcade mode mechanics), and a Story Mode document with random bits and pieces about the game written down randomly.

After trying to navigate through these documents for a while, searching for the answer to another one of our eternal “what did we say about subject x?” questions, I decided it was time to clean things up.

So, over the last few days I’ve been merging all of our documentation – the quest documents, the contents of my notebook, the Story Mode- and Arcade Mode- documents and ordered them properly in a single Google Docs document:

In order to keep things easy to find, we decided to sort this new all-powerful list area by area in chronological order, starting with a “General” section for things affecting general gameplay (such as visible healthbars for co-op), and ending with all things Arcade Mode. Thanks to their “new” (at least, I hadn’t seen it before) outline feature, it became very easy to navigate through the content once I was done, but if the feature wasn’t available I’d probably created something similar in a regular text document, adding a table of contents in the beginning.

We’re very glad to have this new documentation method, which hopefully will save us some time when looking up what exactly we decided after having discussions, and why we came to that conclusion. It is likely we’ll still have to talk about some things again, of course, as we do tend to change our minds around – but at least now we don’t have to take it all from the beginning again!

Now, this week hasn’t been all about documentation, of course. We’ve also continued work on Tai Ming’s second zone (which is drawing closer and closer to completion, art asset wise anyway). In order to prepare for the Giant Thorn-worm battle, we’ve made a battle-worn version of the HQ outdoors:

We also continued on the government/administration building from last week, creating it’s present state as well:

..and finally, yet another character joins the fray! When I made this guy (yes, it’s a he – or it’s supposed to be, anyway), I had some a vision of some kind of mix between Remedi the alchemist in Evergrind City, and a vampire. Yeah I know, don’t ask where these ideas come from. I have no idea! Anyway, he’s supposed to sell potion in Tai Ming’s second zone, and here he is:

That’s all for this week! Next week will most likely be an animation special, as I’ll be taking a couple days off (first vacation days this year!! wohoo) and probably won’t be around to write the next post :)

See you!

The Seasonne patch hit the Frontline beta on Steam on Saturday, and received a patch of hotfixes today! As we’ve talked about in previous blog posts, the patch adds a bunch of content to the Winterland, making it feel more alive. If you haven’t played it yet, you should check it out and tell us what you think!

If you’ve forgotten how to change to the Frontline version, check out this thread.

Santa needs halp!

All the new content gave Vilya a ton of portrait work, so that’s where a good chunk of her efforts have been directed the past week! Here are some of the massive amount of portraits she made:

Meanwhile, Fred has jumped back into creating the animations we’re going to need for all the gold skill charges! Below are all the different casting effects of the Berserker Mode!

 

Soon, the day will come when Teddy shall put all these new skill charges into the game… (but first, he must add Steam achievements and Arcade Mode online leaderboards!)

This week Vilya has been bringing Teddy’s housing prototype to life, with both a GUI and proper graphics!

Our hopes for the housing system is to provide a little break, create a potential money sink, and give players some multiplayer bragging rights with their rare furniture!

(Boss spoiler alert) Fred has been churning out some graphics for the hydra faces as well. Here’s a gif from the currently very crude prototype, giving a little glimpse of how it’s going to work!

(Note: the gif is animated a bit slower than the real game for some reason)

As you can see from the gif, we’ve decided that all hydras should have the summer head, and also to use cleaner, more stylized backgrounds in white and gray!

All breath attacks will cause some lingering effect on the floor, making the battle more difficult. The winter head, as seen in the gif, will freeze the ground causing players to slip around. The summer head will leave a trail of fire, damaging anyone who walks through it (although unlike the ice blast, players can actually affect where the fire breath will land).

We haven’t decided how autumn will affect the playfield yet, but we’re thinking along the lines of mushrooms, which will pop and release blinding spores if you touch them.

Picking up from last week, the three different types of Wizards are now in the game and working properly. The Wizard is a ranged support type of enemy, with each variation having its own unique special ability. Just like their melee counter-parts, the Wizard can only use their special abilities if the current season matches its color.

Click to see the animated GIF!

We have tried our best to make each Knight/Wizard pair have a set of abilities that work in symbiosis with each other. As seen above the Summer Wizard can imprison players, making it harder to avoid the Knights heavy hitting special attack.

The winter Wizard can summon a Ice Shield around a target monster that will slow and damage players within close range. The shield can be destroyed by shielding, attacking or taking damage from it. Paired together with the agility of the winter Knight, it could turn into a deadly threat!

Last but not least the fall Wizard can summon a bunch of tornados that move around at a seemingly random pattern. Players getting too close will be sent flying into any nearby enemy. The tornados can also fuse with fall Knights performing their Spinning Attack, making them super charged in terms of speed and damage.

Vilya has kept on making portraits! Here’s some of her WIP’s from this week:

And here are the finished sprites:

This week we’ve kept on working with the Temple of Seasons, adding more rooms and more seasons! Here’s another GIF, from a room with multiple season orbs:

Click to see it animated!

As you can see, depending on what season it is, there will be different obstacles blocking different paths. Will you be able to find your way through the dungeon?! Only time will tell…

In the meanwhile, here’s one of the versions of the lobby, an important room that connects many different parts of the dungeon, that has kept Vilya busy for a while:

Click for full size!

Don’t forget that you can see more of her work (and additional rooms) over at her blog.

New for this week is also that Teddy has started up a tumblr where he will post GIFs of what he’s currently implementing. Go follow that for more animated goodies.

Oh, and you haven’t forgotten Fred’s old tumblr, have you? That’s the place where he posts what he’s working on.

If cold autumn winds are making you wish you could rewind time and go back to the warm embrace of summer, then our Temple of Seasons™ might be just the thing you’re looking for! Simply whack the supplied Summer Orb and watch the landscape transform around you:

It’s animated! Click it!

We had a long back and forth discussion regarding how the seasons would work in the temple, mostly related to whether the Season Orbs would change the season of the entire temple, or just the current room. In the end, we went with having the orbs control the season of their own room!

Both variants could lead to some interesting progression mechanics, but we went with this variant mostly since it would put a slightly less massive workload on poor Vilya and Fred, while also being a bit easier to create puzzle modules for.

For similar reasons, we opted to have separate orbs that summon their corresponding season, rather than one orb that cycled between them, as in A Link to the Past.

Having the entire dungeon sketched out, we feel it has a ton of potential to be really cool when it’s all done!

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)