Let’s start off with the game related stuff we can show off! Vilya has, among other things, created the temple entrance for the temple of seasons:

The symbols on the circles signify the different seasons, and we’ve got some mechanics in store for the temple that we hope will be fun to use :)

In other news, Teddy and Fred has gotten their new apartment in order for maximum Grindea grinding! A step in that direction has been to create two coffee tables themed after the game.

Above is a shot taken right after we finished them up

And here they are in their natural habitat (sorry for bad camera :[ )

We haven’t been slacking off, though! As promised, we’ve started working on the temple boss, but we don’t want to show it off just yet. How much do you guys want to see anyway? Are you afraid of spoilers? Do you want us to show everything?

Sometimes we feel that we’re showing off a bit too much, but maybe that’s what you guys following the dev blog want anyways!

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

Christmas is drawing near, and we’ve been putting up Christmas decorations and hunting for presents, but that hasn’t stopped us from at least getting some work done on the game!

The miniboss is coming along nicely. As mentioned in the last recap, he can dash across the stage as an invulnerable ball of light, firing bullets all around him. When in physical form, he’ll fire another pattern the player will need to traverse before being able to punish him!

Even normal mode is a bit tricky…

…but hard mode brings it to 11! 

Hmm… I wonder what he’ll be like in the Arena Challenge! As you can probably tell from the screenshots, the temple is flying high above the ground. Perhaps now the birds will make more sense as an enemy :D

Speaking of enemies, here’s the last regular enemy of the dungeon, the Brawler Bot:

These guys can quickly close the gap between you with the help of a rocket dash, followed by a straight punch to the face! One or two of them is not really a problem, but in numbers they start to surround you. If they get shielded by a blue Guardian Crystal, you might be in some trouble!

This week also marks the sad end of Fred’s tablet, a Bamboo Wacom, previously thought indestructible. RIP Mr. Bamboo :(

The following couple of weeks, the updates might not be all that substantial due to the holidays, but we’ll probably manage to squeeze something in!

One of the things we believe make a game more interesting is mini-games. And no game is complete without some good old target practice games! Therefore we have spent some time making such a game for the newly reintroduced bow. This mini-game can be found at the same location you find your bow, in this archer’s cottage just south of Evergrind City:

The archer also works part-time doing wall paintings…

The game is pretty straight forward as of now: You get a limited number of arrows which you can use to hit the various slime boards that pass you by.

You score more points depending on which color slime you hit, with the blue slimes in the back giving the most points. Of course, they’re also the hardest to hit – not only do they get covered by the two rows closer to you, they also move a lot faster.

If you’re skilled enough and hit several slimes in a row within a short time frame, you’ll score additional combo points.

We look forward to seeing your high scores in the beta forums once the patch is up and running ;)

Other than that, here are some new hats which might make it to the patch:

Greenlight

First and foremost, thanks to all of you who voted on us over at our Steam Greenlight page. Thanks to all of you, we just got Secrets of Grindea greenlit and ready to be on Steam as soon as it’s finished!

The past week has been very busy! Apart from fixing bugs and adding requested features, we’ve also implemented a prototype of the pet system, which will be the topic of today’s post!

First off, let’s clarify the difference between summons and pets!

Chilling in Evergrind with both a Cloud summon and a Rabby pet!

A summon is a friendly combatant which is usually created through the use of a skill. Summons will not only cost mana to create, but that mana will remain blocked for as long as the summon stays alive. The popular Cloud is an example of this.

A pet is a companion you can bring with you, which follows you around. It does not join in combat, apart from giving you small stat boosts depending on its level. It costs no mana to keep around. Pets are not acquired through skills, but are caught with baits (or perhaps gained as rewards). An example of a caught pet is the Rabby.

To catch a pet, you’ll first need to find something to lure it with. The bait for attracting Rabbys, for example, is a golden carrot! When you use such an item close to an enemy that’s interested in it, that enemy will engage you and a minigame will ensue!

The minigame is DDR-inspired (how else would you impress someone?), where you must press the corresponding buttons at the right time! If you miss four times, you fail to catch the pet and it will attack you. You won’t lose your lure item, however, so you can try again if you want! By timing the button presses very well (Great or Perfect), the progress bar will gain a small boost and you’ll catch the pet quicker.

If you succeed in the minigame, you’ll catch the pet. If you don’t currently have a pet, it will join you right away. If you’ve already got another pet with you, you’ll get the option to bring the new pet, or keep your old one. The other will be sent to the farm!

The farm is where you keep all of your caught pets. Currently, we haven’t built the farm in-game yet, so we keep the pets inside the Evergrind City Café! The farm is the only place where you can interact with your pets through the action button (otherwise you’d keep talking to your pets all the time when fighting), and it’s also here where you can switch pets if you want to mix it up.

The default pet menu consists of five options:

Feed is how you level up your pet, making it grant better stat boosts (more on this below).

Change Name is just what it sounds like.

Pet Style will change the appearance of your pet into a different variant! For example, Rabbys can have white fur as well.

Bring will make the selected pet your active one, and it will follow you out of the farm (aka Café). Stay will have the opposite effect.

Now, let’s showcase the feed menu!

A good way to spend a lot of the edible stuff you find during your adventure, is to feed it to your pets! Depending on what kind of food you give it, a progress bar corresponding to that attribute will increase. When a progress bar has been completely filled, your pet will level up, and from then on give you a slight bonus in the chosen attribute!

The maximum level a pet can reach is level 10, so the bonuses can’t get infinitely high, but a max leveled pet still has a noticeable effect on the strength of your character.

We’ll also include an option to hide your pet, much like you can hide your headgear. Maybe you want it out of your way when fighting difficult enemies, or perhaps you’re too cool to bring a pet with you but still want the juicy stat bonuses!

That pretty much explains the pet system, so here’s some brief beta info as usual!

The patch containing the pet system, a load of bug fixes and some other changes will hopefully be done in a few days. When it has been approved by Desura and gone live, we’ll proceed with sending out the 3rd batch of invites!

Beta Info

Big thanks to all the people taking part in the beta! An extra shout out to all the guys and gals who took the time to write up feedback for us. It means a ton to us and will really help us make the game as good as it can be.

To all of you who have signed up for the beta but haven’t got the chance to play it yet, hang in there! We will be sending out a batch of new invites when we are ready with a new update for the game. We are working hard on some new features that are in the need of testing, hopefully it will be worth the wait!

Production

As for the production this week, we have done some changes to the Collectors Exam the players must pass during the early parts of the game in order to become a Collector. For those of you who doesn’t know, the exam is divided into a three part trial. Initially the three parts were treasure hunting, puzzling as well as a juicy combat part.

After some feedback and a lot of talking and discussion within the team we decided to change the treasure hunting into a fishing event instead. The main reason for the change was that the fishing system is used much more frequently through out the game, so it made more sense making it a part of the trials. It also streamlined the introduction of the fishing much more for us, something that we have been having headaches over for a while.

The fishing even in action!

Besides reworking and touching up old things, we have made some new progress.  We have started working on a new boss! Two actually, as they are a pair of demon twins. They are an optional encounter, but we are putting just as much love and care into them as the main bosses.

We’ll not dive into detail into the mechanics of how they work since they are still in the prototype stage, so you’ll have to do with some eye candy and the promise of fierce boss battle once it all comes together.

From early design sketches to finished sprites!

And some freshly baked animations!

Beta Info

We’re happy to report that the first week of the beta has worked out really well! Our setup over at Desura/IndieDB is doing its job, and we’ve received lots of great feedback and bug reports!

Our thread where testers post their first impressions is a feedback gold mine, and if you’re a beta tester who’s reading this and haven’t posted there yet, please take a moment to do so!

At the time of writing, we’ve already patched the beta once based on the great community input, and are pushing out a second patch tonight.

Since things went according to plan, we’ll continue on the set track and send out an additional 30 invites as promised! We’ll send them out when the upcoming patch has been uploaded and authorized at Desura, which should hopefully be within a day or so. Again, we’re going to use the IndieDB messaging system, so if you’ve registered for the beta, check your IndieDB-messages!

 Production

A lot of effort have gone into polishing things we’ve got feedback on, and fixing bugs hunted down by our testers. But we have also spent some time adding new content for the game, which should be available in the coming patch.

To begin with, there will be some slight improvements of the Arena. We have refined the point system of the challenges, which now works as follows: Your best grades in every challenge will add up to a total score, and when that total reach certain key numbers, you gain unique items.

For instance, let’s say S is worth 500 and A is worth 300. Then you would have 800 points in total, should you have achieved rank S in one and A in another. If you later increase your A to an S you will earn the remaining 200 points, giving you a total of 1000.

In such a system, we could let players who aren’t super hardcore get a taste of the unique items as well by having a reward at 500 points (which you could get with two As), and a second one on 1000 points (which only the best can get, with two S ranks).

This might be very technical, but hopefully it will make sense to you in the game. Speaking of which, to reflect the new point system we have also improved the arena interface as such:

As you can see, you can now view your current points, which reward you’ll get next, and how many points each rank will give you.

If you’re curious on which the next 3 rewards will be, we have added a poster showing just that on the wall of the Arena Lobby:

Speaking of those rewards, here are some of the new hats offered, in action:

The first three will be offered as rewards in the arena, as you just saw, while the fish hat will replace the old reward for unlocking the Pillar Mountains fishing achievement.

Another improvement we added was effects for some of the potions currently offered in the game. This one will be shown when you drink the Damage Potion, which boosts both your normal attack and skill damage:

We also made one for the Gale Potion, which increases your attack- and castspeed:

That’s all for now! Hope to see you soon in the beta ;)

As the majority probably already knows by now, Steam’s new submission system Greenlight launched last Thursday, and we were lucky enough to jump into the mix quite early. If you have a Steam account but haven’t voted for us yet, you can find our Greenlight profile by clicking the image below!

We’re very happy with how the launch worked out for us. Partly thanks to getting in when there were only a few pages of submissions, we’ve got a ton of sweet exposure through Greenlight. At the time of writing, we’ve got 39 540 visitors, 4 909 favorites and 975 comments! That’s pretty insane.

We’ve also seen a really massive influx of Facebook likes, going from 460 to 600 in four days!

We realize this is largely because a lot of you guys have been spreading the word about the game, so a huge thanks goes out to you all for helping us out :)

Despite the number of Greenlight favorites, we’re still “only” at 4 %, but we think there’s no need to worry. Valve has stated that the number of votes isn’t the be all and end all of success, and Secrets of Grindea won’t even be released for a while so it’s not a catastrophe for us if we don’t get 100 % right away.

Regarding the beta, we’re still on said track: one week from now we’ll send out a handful of invites to test “administrative” stuff, like how the invites work, what forum categories we’ll need for the Beta forum, error reporting and so forth. A week after that, we’ll open the gates for the “real” beta testing! It’s been really cool to see the amount of interest and encouragement in the beta thread, and it’s still not too late to post in there if you haven’t. As mentioned in the thread, we’ll choose randomly from everyone who posts there before the beta starts!

So, a lot of time and energy have went into getting things ready for Greenlight and the beta, but we have managed to still get some work done on the game itself! Due to popular demand, we’ve added an experience bar to the HUD (previously it was shown only in the menu), as well as buff indicators.

When a buff is about to run out, it will start pulsating, and eventually become tinted red before disappearing. We might go for a WoW-like cooldown timer approach if testers find this system to be unclear, although the tiny resolution might make that a bit messy. The buffs in the screenshot above are a damage increasing potion, and a spell which increases attack- and cast speed!

We’ve also changed up the notices for when you complete a quest, get a new card and gain an achievement. They used to look very much alike, so we decided to add some flair to each of them:

Sort of how they all used to look

How they’re looking now

In game, they are filled with text and images, of course. Apart from the GUI-work, here’s a brand new two handed weapon you’ll be able to craft!

So yeah, that’s what’s been going on! Back to crunching!

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: