This week we’ve kept focusing on the phase puzzles, and we’ve finally decided on a set of prototypes! There will be no less than 5 phase puzzles as part of this challenge, although the first ones will be kind of easy and serve as an introduction! :)

Here are some GIFs showing parts of the upcoming puzzles you’ll see (all with placeholder graphics that will be replaced ASAP):

As you can see, we’ve upgraded the block graphics now, so the arrow blocks/barrels that suck you in are actually more or less in their final state. The green ones always point in the same direction, while the pink ones change the direction in which it will launch you when you next press the phase button. We’ve also added proper mirror blocks and squares to this prototype, but we’re gonna do some additional work on them.

Basically, since this place has been abandoned for hundreds of years, we figured they shouldn’t look as clean as they currently are. So, we put Vilya to work, adding cracks, moss & greenery to them in order to make them look more worn. We’ll be continuing this work and show even more variations next week, so stay tuned for that!

Now, back to the Phase Puzzle lobby from last week! We already created the basic room, but left out details, as these blocks weren’t made yet and we definitely wanted to incorporate parts of them as decorations in the room. Time to dive back in:

And speaking of diving back in… In between this Vilya has also been making more improvements on the Time Travel Zone, this time improving upon a garden, as well as adding another portrait, of a priest’s apprentice:

Next week we’ll continue transforming our crude prototypes into real areas with real art. Teddy has already started putting everything together, so hopefully you’ll be able to venture through these challenges from start to finish in the not too far away future! And after that it’s finally onto the next temple… :3

As the title says, we’re back, and we’ve survived our first week back at the office after the holidays! Both Vilya and Teddy suffered from the flu over the christmas break, but now they’re excited to be back and work on the game :)

So, this week Fred has been working on a bunch of NPCs for Mount Bloom! I’m sure you’ll all be very excited to meet these guys:

Meanwhile, Vilya has focused on reworking & adding details to the first time travel map, as we’re drawing ever closer to actually start implementing it! Here’s some video coverage of that as well:

Here’s the lower part of the map, the way it looks right now (more work incoming):

She also threw in a portrait of one of the miners Fred made (shown in the last blog post):

And what about Teddy? Well, he’s been working on a new type of puzzle (kind of), that you’ll be facing up against in Mount Bloom, before you reach the time travel area! Next week we’ll show you some prototypes of that, so stay tuned :)

Hello guys! It’s me, Vilya (actually, I’m the one writing almost all Weekly Recaps, but you wouldn’t know that I guess)!

Today, Fred left town to go home and spend Christmas with his family, and Teddy got the flu and is out of business right now (hopefully he’ll get better in time for the actual holidays). SO I’m sitting here alone tonight, writing this rather late recap, which will also be the last one this year! We’re taking a break until New Years, so we’ll return with the Weekly Recaps on January 11 when we’ve had a week of work back at the office :)

Now, what have we been up to this last week of work? Well, pretty much a bit of everything, as always!

This is a background I’ve made which you’ll pass through after completing the Flower Challenge that we’ve been showing prototypes of lately. Basically you just go in, grab whatever’s in the chest, and leave, so it’s pretty straight forward:

A little bonus GIF of the steps:

Next up, a short map connecting two of the cave areas with each other. Again, just a short breather room:

There’s also this odd portrait of a rather strange mushroom-man! What the-?!

No further comments on that… yet :)

Fred, meanwhile, has been working on a set of miners that will appear throughout the cave, minding their own business or hindering yours:

I know a lot of you want to know more about what Teddy does on the programming side as well, so I’ll tell you this: lately he has been focusing on adding multiplayer support for the challenges we made so far, as well as actually starting to prototype the third one properly! Yay!

He has also been working on ways to make the lag less annoying to those of you who have friends living further away, and he actually even prepared a bunch of graphics to show you how he’s doing it. However, since he’s sick right now, I think we’ll have to save that for next year since he can probably explain that stuff a lot better than I can :)

Speaking of next year: I wish you all an awesome holiday, filled with happiness (and perhaps some fun gaming?!)! You guys are such an amazing community and we’re all so thankful for you support! We’ll keep working on making Secrets of Grindea even better, with much more content next year, and I hope you’ll join us for the ride!

See you in a couple of weeks! :D

Wow! I can’t believe we’re on our 200th weekly recap already! Time flies so fast…

Last week we launched a tiny frontline patch with some use experience upgrades. Among other things, we added a temporary aid to those who have experienced one of the bugs where either their character or their world progress gets deleted as the result of a crash. We’re still not sure what exactly causes these bugs (and we’re doing our best to figure it out!), but we’ve now implemented a system that notices if your savefile has been corrupted and automatically reverts to your last backup (which are added by the games every now and then):

As you can see, it also lets you know how much progress you’ve lost, and tells you where to find the corrupted file, which gets saved in a different location. Sending it to us could help us find out what causes these corruption bugs, so please do if you see this message pop up!

Another thing we’ve been working on is to improve certain on-death bag tips for the game over screen. Currently most of them are random insults that do little to help your efforts, but sometimes (and after this patch, more often) Bag actually gives some useful advice on how to beat the challenge you’re facing:

Unfortunately, it’s quite easy to miss which ones are actual tips, so we’re also adding a bit of clarity to that. Basically, a bold “Listen up!!” (as seen below) will appear, accompanied by some shaking to catch the players attention. Hopefully that makes it stand out a bit more than regular bag commentary!

Meanwhile, Vilya has been working on a bunch of different things. For one, she’s been adding some details to the first map of Mt Bloom, in the shape of a ruined bridge with some statues that will set the theme of what’s to come later on. Here’s the GIF of her progress:

And here’s the final piece of the GIF wip, as well as some additional details added afterwards:

She’s also been playing around with adding stone tablets next to the doorways, in order to make it more clear that they lead somewhere:

We’re still thinking about other ways to add more clarity to which parts of the walls contain a door, such as light effects and the like, but we’ll see where that all ends!

To end this post, there’s also some drops, the portrait of a cave dweller related to the Frostlings of Seasonne, and a couple of animations:

See you next week! :D

This week, we’ve been finishing things up for another frontline update coming later this week! This means Teddy has been busy dealing with balancing, bug fixing and multiplayer support for said portion of the game, and Fred has made some final animations for the upcoming battle:

Vilya also needed to finish something for this update, and unfortunately for Master Ivy, her task was to create a ruined version of Master Ivy’s office:

Once she had completed that task, she went on to improve one of the old Mt:Bloom outskirts maps, adding some greenery and vines to it:

And speaking of Mt:Bloom Outskirts, we kind of need a map from where you can enter the actual mountain, right? So that was made as well:

Since creating WIP GIFs was pretty fun to do, here’s one featuring the creation of the above map as well:

This week we hope to finish things up with the boss battle so that we can update frontline, and Vilya will start getting the Mt:Bloom backgrounds ready for implementation! Soon, it’s time to explore it’s hidden cave systems.. :)

Things have calmed down after the Steam Early Access launch, and things have gone back to normal here in the Pixel Ferrets office!

Vilya has spent a lot of time doing portraits recently, both for the new area(s) and for new fae that will appear in Santa Fae:

Some of the old fae (and the new) also needed new expressions, seeing as the life of a fae is filled with both joy and horror currently:

She has also, of course, been doing new backgrounds for the next temple, which means more interiors left in ruin:

Fred, meanwhile, has been creating stuff for a flashback cutscene that will take place once you get back to the HQ in the next part of the story! This whole thing will involve two things primarily: your mother Charlotte, and…. a dragon?!

Now, as for Teddy, he’s been mostly busy implementing a bunch of UI improvements (Sword and Shield style-slots, wohoo!) as well as tweaks and fixing bugs revealed to us by our awesome beta testers! Once these updates roll out and are confirmed stable we’ll start updating Frontline only for a while again, starting with the cutscene/flashback thingy mentioned above.

See you next week! :D

So, this week we had the honor of being judges at GGC, or Gotland Game Conference, a local games conference hosted by our school, where the students at the Game Design program showcase their game projects and compete for a set of prizes! It’s great to get a chance to meet fellow game developers, talk about the business and just take a short break.

The games were amazing, as always. We keep saying that each year only gets better, and this time was no exception! Below is a showcase video featuring the games that were competing this year, and most of them were really fun:

The Grand Prize winner was Frog Climber, which was a first year project, so it’ll be interesting to see what the developers come up with next year!

Since no weekly recap would be complete without any sort of Secrets of Grindea update, this time we’re sharing two of Vilya’s portrait WIP videos from her personal YouTube account:

The videos feature future Santa Fae residents and the finished sprites can be viewed below:

Last week we talked briefly about our decision to make our move towards Steam Early Access. This brings a lot of positive things with it, and one of the shiniest additions is the Steam Networking.

One of our main features for Secrets of Grindea has always been the online co-op possibilites. Sadly, evil routers all around the world have made this difficult to setup for a lot of players. With access to to Steam’s own network systems, the days of failed port forwarding and stubborn Hamachi clients will soon be over!

Teddy has spent the entire week working on said networking features and have got it up and running smoothly. Now you’ll be able to simply invite players from your Steam Friends and get a multiplayer game up and running in no time!

The Steam Networking features might do a pit stop in the Frontline beta for some good old bug hunting, before we shuffle it into the Stable beta. We’ll give a heads up before it happens!

Besides multiplayer, the skills have stayed in the spotlight for this week. Besides adding the Gold Charges, we are also reworking some of the skills that have been considered over powered/under powered/just lame overall by ourselves and our player base.

The summons of the game have been in need of buff to amp up their usability. Both the Summon Plant and Frosty Friend skills (Not the Cloud. We all love the Cloud <3) have been reworked to some extent, to hopefully juice them up a bit!

The Summon Plant skill still has the same base mechanics as before (Time based, invulnerable summon that dish out damage) but we’ve done some changes to the charge levels.

The Silver Charge (previously just a beefier version of the basic plant) now has a ranged attack. This small but still significant change hopefully will make the plants more useful later in the game.
The Gold Charge (as of now, things always change) works as a Commander, buffing the rest of the plants in an area around it while being able to dish out good damage on its own.

Unlike the Plant, the Frosty Friend has received some actual changes to its base mechanics. There was not much you could do to avoid losing it during bosses and crowded Arcade Mode rooms, which deterred most players from wanting to spend any skill points on it. In an attempt to help with this, we’ve introduced a Command Menu, giving players some more control over their summon!

Once the Frosty Friend have been summoned, pressing the same button again will no longer desummon it, but instead bring up the Command Menu. From the menu you can give your summon simple commands, with more unlocking as you reach new Charge Levels. Activating the commands will not cost any EP, instead we’ve chosen to go with a Cooldown system. Using a command will render it unusable for a short while.

In the mockup above, the commands visible are Defensive, Aggressive, and Desummon.

Desummon does exactly what you think it does. The Aggressive command puts the Frosty Friend in a aggressive stance, boosting attack damage but lowering defense. Usable for when you find an opening to attack during a boss encounter!

The Defensive command gives Frosty a huuuge defense boost and makes him immobile for a while. You could use this when your summon is in i tricky spot and needs to soak up a lot of damage (an annoying boss attack for example). We’ve talked briefly about giving it Perfect Guard mechanics (maybe it could reset cooldowns!?) but we’re still on the fence about it. What do you guys think?

 

The past couple of weeks, Teddy have been working on bringing the new areas into Arcade Mode, and is finally closing in on finishing up (our hopes are to patch in the four new floors before the end of the week)!

We’re doing our best to find that sweet spot of being infuriatingly difficult, yet fair, and also creating interesting traps and compositions for the different areas. Beta testing these new floors is a bit of a challenge, seeing as only a handful of our glorious beta testers have reached the end of the current content, but eventually we’ll nail it down!

Meanwhile, Fred has been hard at work in the skill factory, creating new charges for all the spells! Below are new animations for the Summon Plant and Blade Flurry spells.

Vilya’s off doing her own thing, creating the environments for the next “temple”, a village with a twist on time! For those interested in her work (who isn’t?!), you should check out her blog, where she’s begun posting some sweet time lapses of her workflow!

Here’s her latest one for example, where she’s pimping out one of the early village maps:

A feature that has been missing since we first introduced charge levels to the skills have been the Gold Charge. Since most players wouldn’t reach high enough levels to unlock those we’ve been prioritizing pretty much everything else over them up until now.

However, we are reaching a point in the game where the Gold Charges are becoming relevant during the average playthrough. Introducing a new charge level will bring with it a lot of balancing and tweaking, so we decided the timing felt just right to start the rather massive task of finally implementing them properly into the game.

Because of the fast paced nature of the combat in Secrets of Grindea, we can’t go full “Knights of the Round” in terms of extravagant effects (even though we want to, deep down). We want to amp up the graphics of course, but still keep the fluidity of casting the skills. It will be an interesting balancing act going forward, but we’re confident we’ll be able to combine the best of both worlds!

Below are some “soon to appear in the game, coupled with some dope particle effects and other stuff to make them feel even cooler”-animations made by Fred during the past week. Namely for the Ice Spike, Heroic Slam and Insect Swarm.

BTW, if you’ve always had this cool idea of what your favorite spell’s Gold Charge would look like, or how it’d work, feel free to leave any suggestions in this thread on the forums, and we’ll check it out! :)

Meanwhile, Vilya has started sketching what will eventually become the next temple – which isn’t much of a temple at all, but rather a hidden village! Here are some of her early sketches, featuring a set of houses:

The village will be hidden inside a mountain and will be somewhat inspired by ancient Asia visually. More artwork from this village will be available next week! :)