This weekly recap will be a little different, because very soon – unless something unexpected happens – Secrets of Grindea will be fully released on Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle. That means most of our efforts have been going into working on store page assets, recording and editing stuff for the trailer, ironing out bugs and adding the final bunch of stuff before the release.

The End of Snowbacca Tiers

It also means the Snowbacca Tiers will close on Monday the 26th – that is, in exactly one week, in preparation for the release. We’re incredibly thankful for everyone who has (and will yet) support us by purchasing this tier, but it’s time to wrap it up. That means this is the final chance to be added to the credits and get your hands on the digital production booklet (which will be available some time after the release).

What’s Next?

While the game will soon enter 1.0 and be fully released, we’ll continue adding some further improvements in post-release updates. However, our hopes are that most of these will be quality of life and visual upgrades that won’t affect the overall experience too much. Obviously we’ll also keep cleaning up bugs that get reported, and we do have a dream of adding New Game+ or some such in the future, although we’ll give you more details on that when things have settled down a little bit.

More information on the upcoming release will be available very soon. Thank you all so much for your continued support – we’d never have been able to do this without you!

With the release very close at hand, we’ve continued to finish up the last bunch of stuff! This week that means making icons for the achievements we decided on:

For the defeat Grindea achievement, we actually had a bunch of different options, but settled for the first one shown here:

Some of these achievements will be available both in-game and through Steam, and some will be hidden and on Steam only.

We also made a final(?) bunch of items:

….and started to prepare some of the Steam related things (emoticons, trading card badges and so on):

Fred, meanwhile, continues working on the trailer, which currently looks something like this:

Not quite done yet, as you can see – but we’re getting there! :)

The interface fixes continue this week with an overhaul of the pet system interfaces, which should be fully translatable once these updates are in the game!

First up the pet caught box:

The new feeding menu:

As you can see here we’re pretty much aiming to remove as many of the texts as possible, using icons to illustrate what’s going on instead!

The Pet rename interface:

…and finally the swap pet window:

The quest received and quest completed, card album updated and teleport plate notification boxes have also been updated to make sure they’re translatable and visually matching the in-game menu overhaul that’s on it’s way in as well:

We’re also recording a new trailer in anticipation of the release, which is what Fred has been working on most of this week. Stay tuned for that once it’s finished! :D

Another week and more interface fixes in preparation for the final release! These fixes are all meant to make sure the game can be fully and properly translated, but they will also ensure the menus and interfaces of the game look a lot better :)

First up, the arena and target practice interfaces:

Mostly we’ve removed the built in text and touched up the graphics slightly here.

The popup menus in the equipment section of the menu had some sizing issues we’ve taken care of, which meant the icons had to be edited to a new size (and some remade more or less completely):

We’ve also remade the skill info and skill upgrade sections to make sure there’s enough room for translated text and fonts used by different writing systems:

Finally, Fred has been adding some post-endgame sprites for some of the NPCs found around Grindea, as things settle down after you’ve saved the world :)

We’re baaaack in the office and things are moving pretty quickly!

First of all there’s a lot of meetings to be had regarding what final things we’ll add before 1.0 – deciding which sound effects we still need to order, finalizing the achievements list and making the appropriate graphics, figuring out what steam assets we need and deciding on how to correct some things that aren’t compatible with the translation suite.

One such translation issue we’ve had has been the in-game menu headers, which Vilya made textless versions of last week, allowing them to be translated in a future update:

Another thing we’ve been working on has been adding the final Pet skins – so far some slots have been locked, but as of the next update every pet will have 6 different skins! Here’s a bunch of the new ones:

Meanwhile, Teddy continues to implement our fixes and additions, meaning all the new haircuts will be in the game next update, along with a ton of smaller improvements and bug fixes. Stay tuned! :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone!

We’re just dropping in to wish you all a merry christmas and let you know that a new patch is out on frontline as of last week! The patch notes can be accessed here, but in short it allows you to play all three endings: one for Arcade Mode and two for Story Mode.

With this patch out of the way, we’re going to go home to visit some family and try to relax for a bit before we get back to preparing for the actual release of this game. We’ll be back in the office on the 8th of January, which means the next blog post will be available on the 15th. In the meanwhile, please enjoy the latest patch and let us hear all of your feedback :)

Again, we wish you all a merry christmas and a happy new patch year!

Hello everyone! Before jumping into this week’s update, I’m happy to say that Teddy is doing fine and is back at work as of this week! :)

Now, it’s time to summarize another week and show more progress as we near the release of Secrets of Grindea. Let’s begin with a little menu revamp – remember the ‘character cards’ that greet you as you decide which of your characters you wanna play as? Here’s a reminder for those of you that haven’t been in-game for a while:

With the game nearing release we’re trying to clean up as many places as possible that cause issues for game translations. In several languages the font size needs to be quite a lot bigger than what the graphics were initially designed for, which has already lead to quite a few redesigns throughout the game. The character cards is yet another example of something that’s been incompatible with translations, and so we felt it’s high time we correct that.

Without further ado, here’s the new version:

Not only is this new version compatible with the translation suite, it’s also – in our opinion – more visually pleasing, with more graphics and less text. The background indicates where your character has its current savepoint, rather than it being stated in text, and along with your completion percentage you get a little progression bar.

As some spawn points were missing background images, Vilya made a bunch for the missing ones as well:

Can you tell which one belongs to which area or part of the game?

Meanwhile, Fred’s been cleaning up a bunch of effect animations and made some sweet water animations (which are tile-able!):

Finally, remember those starry card pieces from last week’s update? Have a look at what those look in their proper setting:

Another week with lots of stuff happening, some good and some bad. To get the bad news out of the way, Teddy started feeling bad early last week and was rushed to the hospital after a fainting episode. There it was was confirmed that he’s got a pretty bad case of covid19, so he’s been on bed rest since then. At present we’re not sure when he will be fit enough to get back to work, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed and press on in the meantime.

So this week Vilya has been checking off a bunch of smaller things we felt needed fixing. Among these were adding missing expressions for some of the characters, editing the colouring for the math puzzle in the same area, and adding the graphics for a hat you’ll be able to get after finishing the game:

She also made some smaller adjustments to a bunch of portraits that were broken in various ways (such as messed up colours or them being too big for the dialogue box), and added some additional decorations to a couple of places. Below you can see what the small desert cottage will look like after completing a certain hidden quest, and some greenery added to the area to the right of the farm in Evergrind West, where we first thought we’d have some sort of farming minigame which we ended up scrapping – meaning it looked a bit too empty for something that isn’t going to be used in any way:

Meanwhile, Fred’s been working on animating the starry cards sky that will feature in one of the very last cutscenes of the game:

…For what is endgame in any epic jRPG-inspired game without a trip to the stars? :)

This week, Teddy has been implementing the new Zhamla mechanics for hard mode we showed last week – his stealing your barrier and smashing your health potion! Here’s a couple of short videos showcasing what this looks like in game right now:

Meanwhile, Fred has been doing a ton of animations for the bad/normal ending (most of which we don’t want to show on here for spoiler reasons), new projectiles for Zhamla’s (and everyone elses) bullet hell attacks as well as cleaning up the Frosty walk animation:

We’re also working through the list of all the things we’ve found to improve, change or add during our most recent and final playthrough of the game. We’re sorting these items into three categories:

Vital for release (mainly bugs and/or things that are broken in some way)

“Would-Be-Nice-For-Release” (things that could definitely run or look a bit better, which we’ll add as many as we have time for)

and, finally:

“Post Release”, in which we put all things we’d ideally like to add but are minor or involve a lot of development time for the improvement you get (a lot of purely visual improvements go here, many of which might never end getting added depending on how we feel after release).

Right now the ‘Vital for release’ list isn’t too long, and we intend to keep it that way. After all, we’re on the final stretch now and though some may not believe it, nobody wants to finally get to 1.0 more than us! :)

Another week, and lots of progress on the final battle(s)!

This week we’ve been working on two major things: Zhamla’s boss battle (hard mode version), and fine-tuning the ‘normal’ ending.

When it comes to Zhamla’s boss battle in hard mode, we’ve felt that health potions and some supportive spell (Barrier, I’m looking at you) pose a bit of a design challenge for us. Every opening and every cinematic attack will give your barrier and potion time to recharge, and since the battle is long the amount healed with that combination can become quite insane. This isn’t an issue on the Normal difficulty, as it’s not designed to be as much of a challenge and we expect they will each serve as vital means for many to be able to defeat him at all. However, on hard mode, you’re basically asking for a challenge.

So how have we decided to solve this? Here’s a clue:

Basically, if you try to drink a health potion in hard mode, Zhamla will snatch the potion from your hand and smash it to the floor!

As for Barrier….

It might not be clearly illustrated here, but Zhamla will actually steal your barrier, getting it as a shield for himself!

In other words, barrier and health pots are off limits if you wish to defeat Zhamla on hard mode :)

As for the Normal Ending cutscene, we’re adding some minor animations and changing up some timings (editing some of the “directing”, if you will), to give the end a bit more oomph than it currently has. Though our first intention was for it to be pretty clear it wasn’t the true ending, we also don’t want it to feel too rushed, which has turned out to be a fine line to walk.

That’s all for now! See you next week :D