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.

With the core enemies of the dungeon reaching a pretty complete state, we’re moving on to the juicy stuff. Bosses!

The game up to this point has been relatively boss heavy, which is a trend we are aiming to keep going. Designing and creating all the different bosses has definitely been one of the highlights of the production. Hopefully you guys feel the same way about playing them!

The Temple of Season will feature two mini-bosses on top of the “real” Dungeon boss. As with prior bosses, keeping every fight different (but still fun and challenging) has been our main goal when designing them.

Fred spent parts of last week working on the sprites for one of the two mini-bosses, the Season Hydra.

The premise of the fight is that each head will grow stronger whenever it’s matched up with its season. Players will have the ability to change the seasons during the battle and will have to do so on a regular basis to avoid making one of the heads too powerful.

Vilya, on the other hand, has kept making portraits! Here’s a bunch of WIP’s, as well as their finished sprites:

Fred has been soldiering on with the temple’s basic enemies, finishing up the knights! As we’ve mentioned previously, they would share many similarities, but all have different special attacks they can use if the current season match their color.

The Autumn Knight spins his sword and chases after players
much like Giga Slime’s saw spin!

The Winter Knight dashes through the playfield
akin to the player’s own Piercing Dash-ability

The Summer Knight unleashes a powerful, uninterruptable smash,
breaking shields and dealing tons of damage

Next week we’ll be focusing on the different Season Wizard’s special abilities!

Since Vilya’s now reached a roadblock on the temple rooms (since the few left must be discussed in detail before she can make them), she’s returned to the portrait factory, remaking and revamping!

One of these portraits are the plushie collector in the city. We decided to make her a bit younger when we updated the portrait, as well!

Here’s how she used to look:

And here’s the step-by-step for the new portrait:

Talking about portraits, don’t forget that you can get more in-depth information of Vilya’s work over at her personal blog!

So this weekend we went to Dreamhack Stockholm to exhibit the game (and watch some brilliant esports)! The expo was a blast, and we met a lot of awesome people. It’s always great exhibiting the game and chatting with you guys IRL!

Instead of showing more progress on the Temple of Seasons this week we thought it’d be nice to show some pictures from Dreamhack instead (sorry for the crappy quality, tho):

Hope to see you next time!

We got some pretty exciting news. We’ve been invited by our old school to tag along to Dreamhack Stockholm this coming weekend to showcase our game at the game expo!

This will be the first ever visit to a Dreamhack event for all of us and even though it’s not one of the big ones (Dreamhack Summer & Winter) we are all super pumped to showcase Grindea, talk to people and watch some e-sports! If you are in the neighborhood, drop by and hang out with us!

Anyways, the most common usage for the Season Change Ability will be to open up new paths to explore. For Fred, this means a lot of animations for different obstacles to block the progression for the players.

Most blockades will only be opened during a specific season and closed during the other two. The Phase Shift plate below for example will be blocked by the giant lily pad during the summer and frozen shut during the winter.

And to end this post, here’s a couple of the rooms that Vilya has been working with:

See you next week!

Way back, before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, we used to have a crafting tab in the inventory, from which all your crafting needs were carried out. Things changed, and instead crafting was to be handled at the different shops in town.

Looking back, this was a rather misguided decision, and so we’ll bring crafting back into the menu!

Instead of the old interface used in the shops, we’re using the layout previously found when looking at recipes via your inventory. The tradeoff is that you can’t display as many items at once, but a clear benefit is that much more information is available at first glance!

You can now see what type of item it is, and the exact ingredients required directly in the list. By pressing right or left, you can also cycle through the ingredients to see their description, stats and how many you own. Oh, and if you still prefer to find recipes through the inventory (by selecting an ingredient), you can craft from there as well!

With this change, we’ll also add a feature we’ve promised for a while now, namely the ability to track crafting recipes:

When tracking a recipe, it will appear where you’d normally see your tracked quest, allowing you to see your progress without needing to visit the menu. You can still cycle through your active quests like normal using TAB (or RB/R1 on controllers); the tracked recipe will behave just like another quest.

With this, the shopkeepers will lose their crafting licenses and can only Buy/Sell. Let’s hope they don’t go out of business! :C

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.

This week we’ve continued working on the Temple of Seasons. It will be one of the most graphically heavy areas of the game since both enemies and scenery will have three different variations, so our grahpic duo have wasted no time getting started!

Below is one of the early rooms of the temple in all of its autumny glory.

If you missed it a few weeks ago, Vilya have started up a workblog that goes a lot more indepth about the graphical assets she’s making, like the room seen above. Be sure to check it out!

Fred have spent the week finishing up all of the animations for the Summer varation of the Knight enemies we showed off a while ago. The Summer Knight will work as a base for both the Fall and Winter versions. Besides different weapons, each enemy will have their own set of unique moves they will have access to if the area is set to their season.

Above is the Summer Knights special move, a high damaging single target attack with Guard Crush (instantly destroys your shield if not perfect guarded) and a huge knockback.

Besides fancy special attack, the knights will be the first enemy in the game that uses shields. The enemy shields will work similar to player shields in terms that they have their own HP and can break if taking too much damage.

In case you missed it, we’ve now updated the Frontline beta to include the Toy Factory! If you decide to play it through, we’d love to hear your thoughts over at the forums, regardless if you liked it all or hated it all!

When you try it out remember to not use overpowered characters (unless you want it to be easy)! Being level 15 or something is fine, but if you’re sporting the best gear in the game and a high level pet, you should probably equip something less powerful, or at least switch to Hard.

With those news out of the way, let’s get our hands dirty with the upcoming Skills & Talents Overhaul!

Talents will be a new kind of passive skills, which the player can level besides the regular active skills that are in the game today. You’ll level these using talent orbs, which you gain one of every time you level.

The intended function of the Talents are to improve the possibility to specialize and help create build- and gameplay diversity, as well as give players opportunities to mitigate weaknesses. For example, there’s a Talent which extends the Perfect Guard window to help players struggling with that, and we’re also implementing Talents that promote using a combination of weapon skills and magic spells by adding bonus effects.

Gameplay wise, the system should help players find a more personal play style, but it will also help improve other aspects of the game. Since most people prefer to switch between no more than 2-3 active skills, there will eventually be a point where additional skill points won’t feel as rewarding as they did early on in the game. With Talents, there will always be something useful to spend your points on, ensuring that each level up gives the player a meaningful choice.

It also opens up for a new kind of quest reward. While we already have a quest which grant a Bronze skill point, due to the problems mentioned above, it isn’t necessarily a cause for celebration for those players who already got their main skills leveled to Silver. A Talent point will nearly always be valuable, making it an “objectively good” reward. It’s also much more interesting than giving just EXP.

To help Talents stay relevant, all Talents will have percentage based effects. That way, regardless if you’re level 10 or level 100, that 10 % MaxHP bonus will be just as relevant.

If you want to check out more details about the Talents we currently have planned, and come with suggestions for new ones, please check out the official forum thread!

This week we’ve focused on completing the prototyping of the entire Toy Factory, as well as applying some polish to its first half. For posterity, we’ve saved all the different development stages of a challenge room, to show you what prototype iteration can look like!

This was our first iteration. It’s pretty hard to see what’s going on since it’s all place holder graphics, but the idea was to have conveyor belts going in circles through the room (the fields with arrows), and the red dots were things you had to strike with your weapon when they appeared.

The challenge was designed so that you needed to use the speed boost from the conveyor belts to quickly move around the room in order to hit the different targets before they disappeared.

We implemented a prototype of the challenge, but quickly realized that it wasn’t up to par. The challenge was there, but it didn’t feel good. Sometimes, that last part is just lack of polish, but this time we felt it went beyond that. We decided to scrap it entirely.

Back at the drawing board, we decided to experiment with a mechanic that was intended for the Toy Factory boss, namely toy trains. This idea was, in short, to have trains go around a track to provide dynamic area denial while having the players face a second challenge, which originally was going to be fighting enemies.

After brainstorming a bit, we decided against the enemies since it would be too similar to other encounters in the mini-dungeon, and instead came up with the idea of piling on a second type of area denial: falling bombs. For this, we moved things around a bit and came up with this layout:

The playfield was divided into nine squares (term used loosely here). Bombs would fall inside randomly chosen squares, between which trains would zoom by on the rails. The challenge was to move between the squares, while simultaneously dodging trains. Each train crossing had a track switch, which changed at regular intervals, causing the train patterns to constantly differ.

Using the map above, we implemented a prototype of the trains themselves, as well as their switching. This time, it felt interesting right off the bat, and we decided to go forward with this idea and continue iterating.

This is how the background looked after cleaning things up and measuring distances. At this point, we added the falling bombs to the prototype.

It felt pretty good, but oftentimes the trains would be too chaotic for player effort to actually be rewarded. You’d feel you had a good read on the situation, but then a switch changed and suddenly a train could still blindside you as you moved between the squares.

We decided that by making the pattern consistent, we could improve clarity and decrease frustration while still maintaining what made the challenge interesting.

Time to click!

In the end, this was the prototype we went for. The image above links to an animated GIF, so be sure to click on it! Note that this is still the prototype; there’s a whole bunch of polish left, as you can see, but the core gameplay is there.

This little story is a good example of how gameplay can (and will) change as you go along, and that you should never expect your initial idea to be perfect as-is.

It also conveys the issue of hidden/surprise development time – one of the biggest reasons it’s so damn hard to estimate how long things will take on a macro level. This is why young companies (ourselves included) so often are very optimistic in the beginning regarding how long time a game will take to make.

You can look at some other game that took years to make and go “hey, I could make a game like that in six months” and you might be right, but then you never take into account all systems, sub-systems, prototypes, sprites, models, textures and lines of code that had to be made and thrown away in order for that final game to grow into existence.

Some closing food-for-thought: almost every game you’ve ever played has gone through this at almost every stage of development. Even amazing triple A games has looked terrible and been a clunky mess to play at some point!