This week we’ve continued the effort to fill out all the empty spots in the skill trees (or skill planes), and have two to show off!

The first one is called Dodging Strike, a skill we hope will further increase the nimble feeling of the one handed route. When you press the skill button, you immediately dash backwards, landing in the charge stance several paces away. When you release the button, you will rush forward to your initial position, damaging anything in your way.

Click to view an animated gif!

It doesn’t do much good to just use it randomly and attack enemies that come near though. The base damage is pretty meager, and the cost and charge time for higher levels are both high. However, if you successfully dodge an attack with the backdash, the attack will become empowered. You will deal bonus damage, your charge speed is doubled and the cost for higher charge levels are greatly reduced. In a sense, it’s a bit like the perfect guard.

The second hasn’t been implemented yet, but Fred has animated pretty much everything it needs. It’s called Frosty Friend and is the third and final summoning spell we’ve got planned for the game. It’s also the only summon that physically partake in combat! That is, it will move around fighting enemies, and it can be attacked by enemies as well.

Since it works very differently from the cloud or the plants, we still have to work out some details. For instance, how smart it should be, what kind of control the player should have, its engagement range and, perhaps most importantly, what should happen when the creature is defeated. We’re considering to either give it a set timer for how long it will remain incapacitated, or using the same resurrection system that we have in multiplayer (an ally must stand next to your ghost for 5 seconds).

Needless to say, it’s going to be interesting to implement, and there’s a lot of design details we will have to figure out after we’ve tried it out in game!

Apart from the occasional GUI assets, Vilya has been keeping up with the portrait makeover, giving many of the main story characters an updated look:

As some of you might have noticed, and most of you probably didn’t, we didn’t post any recap last week! The reason was we wanted to wait with urging beta testers to revisit the beta until a hotfix addressing some issues became live at Desura. Due to some system error, this took a whole week, and so it came to pass that we didn’t post the update. Here it is, though!

For those of you who’re in the beta, the Arcade Mode was recently added and is in dire need of first impressions, feedback and bug hunting! We’ve already gotten some good feedback from early bird testers, but we’re eager to get more. To that end, we’ll invite a bunch more people to the beta in a day or so!

Apart from tinkering with the beta update, we’ve also added a brand new two handed skill, which for now goes under the poetic code name Smash!

Click the image for an animated version!

Basically, it’s a powerful swing which deals damage and propels enemies away! The bulk of the damage does not lie in the initial smack, however. Any enemies struck by a launched creature will take double damage, and if a launched enemy hits a wall, it will take a lot of additional damage as well!

In other words, this is a skill which require great care of positioning to use effectively, but if you master it the damage potential is huge. Also, you have to take enemy sizes into consideration. Heavier enemies require a higher charge level to be launched, and will only take the initial damage if you can’t send them flying!

Now that most new GUI elements have been taken care of, Vilya is back in portrait land and has been making portraits for some new characters:

To round things off, here’s a spinning insect which we can’t wait to frustrate players with:

This week we’ve been doing a little bit of everything! One of those things has been to revisit one of the old two handed skills, Whirlslash.

The Whirlslash was supposed to be sort of a physical damage equivalent to the Ice Nova, but due to its slow speed it wasn’t quite as satisfying to use. To rectify this, we’ve reworked the spell to make it near-instant.

Below you can compare the old vs. new Whirlslash (click to see animation):

The Rabby never saw it coming!

In the land of GUI and usability, we’ve added a Quick Equip-function! Now that we’ve played the Arcade Mode quite a bit, the issue of having to go into the menu to equip things has become more apparent. To help against this, we’ve both added Auto Equip for item slots that are not in use, and a little pop-up that appears if you find an item type that’s already equipped!

Below is an example where I had the Wooden Sword equipped, but find a Ruby Rod as a challenge reward. The little window to the right previews the changes in stats (less ATK, much more MATK), and lets me press TAB (or RB/R1 on controllers) to equip it right away!

Click to show animation!

As you might’ve spied in the gif above, the Ruby Rod had a blueish glow underneath. That’s another change we’ve added; rare drops and equipment now has an aura to make it more obvious that something neat has been dropped among the apples and carrots.

This week has been all about progress, in more than one way. Not only are we progressing with the game in general, we’ve also been focusing on how you progression in the Roguelike-mode (now officially named Arcade Mode) will affect your character and the town of Arcadia.

We mentioned unlockable town improvements in a previous post, and now we’ve actually put some of them into the game:

Click the image for some animated GIF acion!

Our goal is to make you feel like you’re accomplishing more than just another high score for yourself: you’re actually helping the town expand, and in doing so also unlock new quests and perks for yourself.

Most of these improvements are unlocked simply by playing the arcade mode. When you die, your current score will add itself to a total score which represents all of your game runs combined, and once that hits certain levels you’ll unlock a variety of rewards, including town upgrades:

Every town needs a Mayor, and Arcadia is no different! Just like the town, he evolves the more points you manage to score while playing in Arcade mode.

Now it’s time to pack our bags, as we’re set to go represent the game over at Gamex in just a few days! Teddy and Vilya will be there for the entire event, so please drop by to try the game, chat or complain about the nonexistant release date anytime between Thursday and Sunday (check opening hours at the site).

To find us, look for Uppsala University’s GAME booth, where we’ll be hanging out with some of our old classmates who are also bringing their game projects :)

This week Fred has been focusing on making the Fae Village come alive in form of tons of flavor animations for the tiny inhabitants. Below are a couple of the happy villagers doing their everyday Fae-chores!

Introducing some new weapons in the game has been long due, so we felt it was time to supply the players with some new slime obliteration tools. Below is a mighty twohanded axe, with much more to come!

 Vilya, on the other hand, has continued working with the cards:

She has also been making background and new GUI elements for the new rogue-like game mode, which is progressing nicely. We’re planning on having every major area featured in the mode, and right now we’re working on the floors representing Pillar Mountains, which is the first area of the story mode:

Click to view in full size!

We’ve mentioned before that we are putting a lot of effort into making our quests and side quests stand out from the regular “Collect X and return here”-formula. While Collect Quests will be present (you are playing as a Collector after all!) they will not appear as frequently as in your average RPG.

The Winterland will be no different, with a bunch of different tasks for the players to handle. One of those tasks involves cleaning up the old Toy Factory and shutting down the Christmas Gift Machine within that has gone berserk!

Staying within the Winterland, Vilya has been hard at work putting together some proper cards for some of the beloved monsters roaming around in the snow!

Finally, we’re also keeping up the effort to gradually bring old stuff up to par. For example, we’ve  reworked how the Teleport Plates gets activated and we’ve given the fireball spell a trail effect, making it feel a bit more fancy:

 BEFORE:

AFTER:

Click to view as animated gifs

Since the Dad character got an all new look last week, Fred took the time to put together a brand new sprite to go with it!

Besides reworking some other older animations in need of touch ups, Fred also went ahead and made graphics for some trap-like hazards we’re adding to the game.

The roots will act as a blockade that players either have to destroy or move around. The spiked version will deal damage if walked into, and the beehive will rapidly spawn Bees until the hive itself is destroyed.

Since your reaction to the rogue-like mode/endless dungeon was so positive, we’ve also put together a little prototype of such a mode to measure the potential. Here’s a screenshot of how it currently looks:

Click to view in full size!

We’ve decided to make it a room-to-room affair, much how it works in The Binding of Isaac, partly for productivity reasons. Basically, each room presents the player with a challenge (usually battling a group of monsters). The drop rates have been adjusted so that interesting items drop more often, and every enemy also have a small chance to drop a random piece of equipment suited to the floor.

In the screenshot, you can also see the thorns showcased earlier in the post. Traps and obstacles are used to avoid having most rooms looking exactly the same.

Another source of variation visible in the screenshot is elite mobs, based on a suggestion by JayneM over at the beta forums. It’s a more streamlined version of the microbosses we talked about a few weeks back. Every monster has a small chance of spawning as an elite enemy, giving them changes to their stats and behavior. The bee (pink aura) in the screenshot moves faster, has more HP and a much shorter wind-up time for its dive attack. The elite version of the Green Slime will leave trails of extremely slowing goo behind when it moves, making the encounter more challenging the longer you leave it alive.

Apart from being significantly stronger, elite mobs have really high drop rates on all their items and gold, while also granting more exp if killed.

Other stuff we’re also considering adding are different types of shops, semi-random puzzles with time limits, challenge rooms, performance based scoring, etc.

If you have any more suggestions for us, don’t hesitate to drop a comment!

One of the secrets we’re most excited about adding to Grindea are the microbosses!

Microbosses are unique enemies that are usually related to the normal mobs in some way, but are way stronger. A tiny taste of this that’s currently in the beta is the white rabby. 

He might look cute and fluffy, but he’s the #2 cause of death in the game

Most players enjoy the addition of the white rabby, but he’s not quite as interesting as we want most microbosses to be, since he has no extra moves except some tweaked base properties (more mobility, more health, more damage, more stun resistance etc).

During the past week, one of Fred’s tasks has been to create a microboss we hope will be a better example of what we want to achieve: the Frostling Leader!

 

The Frostling Leader will have a moveset inspired by the two regular Frostling monsters, the melee Rogue and the ranged Scoundrel. Our hope is to have it nearly as interesting to fight as a full fledged miniboss, but with way less workload regarding the visual design. A win-win situation if we ever heard of one!

This week, we have finished up one of the last enemy designs for the Winterland. As of now we call them Frostlings!

They are agile little creatures with a taste for mischief. Avoiding to get hit and blocking are preferred when fighting these little trouble makers since they have a habit of stealing gold from Collectors venturing through the Winterland! If they nab some of your cash, you’ll have to whack them with something hard before they escape with your life savings.

These cuties will probably pop up during one of Fred’s streaming sessions in the near future, getting some animation work done together with the rest of the Winterland enemy lineup!

Teddy has spent some time reworking how resetting puzzles work. Instead of our old “instant reset” we’ve implanted a sort of Braid-like system. Besides looking way cooler, this allows players to undo single moves instead of fully resetting the puzzle when caught in a deadlock.

Before:

After:

Click the pictures to view the animated GIFs.

Besides all the secret cool stuff we are currently working on, Fred has been hard at work in the effects workshop. Below is a new animation for when the player receives special items/powers as well as a mixed bag of other effects!

Hello again and welcome to yet another weekly recap! We’re still fighting on with the dungeon, with Teddy implementing the last things before fine-tuning sessions and multiplayer edits.

Vilya has revisited some of the maps of the dungeon this week as well, improving its overall look and feel. As an example, here’s one of the outdoor maps before the improvements:

And here’s a couple of shots after:

As we’ve been stressing – it’s all in the details, and visual improvements will most likely keep being implemented all over the world of Grindea when there’s time.

When it comes to the animation department, Fred started working on the Yeti enemy we showed a few weeks back. Below are some idle animations created during a streaming session from last night.

Shout out to everyone who tuned in and kept him company, we’re gonna be doing streams a bit more often in the future since Fred has upgraded his 4 year old laptop to one of Teddy’s 4 year old desktops!

If you want to be notified when the stream starts, make sure to subscribe to Fred’s twitch channel here.

In other animation news, there’s also a level 3 version of the Summon Plant spell! As you could probably guess, it has increased range compared to the lower levels, and of course it also deals more damage.

However, perhaps the most important feature is its increased cuteness:

Last but not least, we’re very excited to have received our very first fan art! This piece was made by Crispat87 during the streaming session last night.

Thanks a lot man, we really appreciate it! :D