This week, we’re continuing our efforts to put new skills into the game! This time we’ve been focusing on the one-handed weapon skills, and put together two entirely new ones for you to try out!

The first one is a spell which summons shadow clones of yourself who will follow you around and deal damage to whatever you hit with your normal attacks.

Click for animated gif!

On level one you’ll get a single clone which deals 33% of your normal attack damage, and at level two you’ll gain another clone which deals 25% of your damage. The spell type works pretty much like the Cloud Strike spell for now: after you cast it once it reserves part of your mana pool and stays active until you cast it again.

The second spell is an area of effect spell in which your character channel his or her inner power and deal damage to all enemies within a target circle.

Clickety-click!

As you level this skill you’ll notice that the target circle becomes bigger and that you’ll be able to hit the enemies within it an additional number of times.

Next up we hope to finally finish the dungeon, so get ready for some epic boss battle(s)!

Time for another recap! This week we’ve been finishing off the boss, which is now playable in single player! Still no pics though, no spoilers here. What we can show, however, is this:

Some cute idle animations made for the enemy from last week, the Frostlings! As you can see they have already selected their weapons of choice, which tells a bit of how they work in the game. As you may have guessed, the fellow with the snowball is a ranged version, while the one with the stick will fight you up close.

We’ve also decided to make a change in the game as you know it right now: We’re removing the health potions!

Why? Because they simply didn’t contribute that much to begin with! In our game you respawn pretty much directly where you died, so dying isn’t a terrible thing. Having a bunch of health potions in the game means you’ll die less, but does that really matter when your death isn’t that much of a punishment? The only place where the health pots would make a difference is in boss fights and challenges where you’ll have to replay the entirety of the fight when you die.

Edit: To clarify, you don’t respawn on the spot when you die, you respawn at the start of the current map with everything reset. The thing that killed you, and everything before it, will be alive and at full health!

Lastly, the skill needed to use health potions isn’t proportional to the significance they have in battle. If using all of your health pots give you the equivalent of your Max HP, then using potions effectively doubles your survivability.

This also means that a player who forgets to use them (many do) will have a fight that’s twice as difficult! The balance issues this creates seems a bit unnecessary for something that isn’t exactly a part of the core gameplay.

Seeing it in this light also makes you realize how dull it truly is to go back and forth to town just to stack up on some more pots. What do you guys think?

Now, as you may notice, the blog looks a bit empty today! That’s because Vilya has been busy travelling to Sweden from her secret lair in the Netherlands and therefore hasn’t been able to polish anything enough to show in the blog. She’s still working on the cave system, which we’ll see more of in the near future, as well as some details in the winter area that are yet to be made.

The reason she’s coming to Sweden at this time is because the entire Pixel Ferrets crew has been invited to judge this year’s GGC competition where the students present their game projects. The conference is held in Visby, Gotland on June 4th-5th. We expect it to be a blast, and is also a nice opportunity for the three of us to hang out face to face for a couple of days.

Will we see any of you there?

This week, aside from more Winterland animations, Fred has been working on some more equipment! The game had a shortage of shields in particular, so we set out on a quest to rectify that.

Here’s a little video that shows the process of creating a new weapon and a shield:

We’re doing our best to add secondary stats and special effect on equipment of similar tier.

Secondary stats means that even if an armor piece usually raises DEF, and a weapon usually raises ATK, that’s not all they could do. Perhaps the armor is a wizard’s robe raising INT, or maybe it’s cursed and will raise ATK while actually lowering DEF? Conversely, perhaps you could fight with a wrench, which has weaker ATK than a same tier sword, but raises DEF or the recovery speed of your shield.

Special effects on equipment are a bit more advanced than regular stats. For example, the Energy Shield will power up projectiles you bounce back with Perfect Guard, making them deal 50 % more damage. The Crystal Shield has about half the HP of the other shields, but the Perfect Guard damage reduction is 85 % instead of 50 %, making it much more durable if you trust your ability to perfect guard consistently.

The goal is that We don’t want every equipment swap to be based on a quick glance, but to have players select gear suiting their play style.

To end this post we have a little something from Vilya as well: a couple of skill icons!

Some are new, some have been improved. Which has been the overall theme for her work these weeks – making small changes here and there, especially around the dungeon. Next up for her, however, is continuing the cave area we showed a few weeks back, so stay tuned for that!

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

This week we have focused on adding those small details that tend to make an area feel more alive. Often it’s not the way you make the biggest or most important sprites that makes an area nice, it’s in how you decorate and add details. Here’s some examples of the improvements we made:

Here’s another example, where we did not only add decorations, but also changed the layout quite a bit:

In this room we planned to block the way up the stairs to a key until you solve a puzzle using the machine to the right. However, as we thought about it we realized it would probably be cooler if solving the puzzle itself was enough to unlock the door. Therefore we made the room smaller before redecorating it to look a bit more interesting.

Lastle, here’s an animated gif of what the walls will look like in the game:

We’re really excited about how the dungeon is coming together, and we hope you guys will like it as well.

As we’re writing this we’re also well on our way of refining a specific part of the dungeon where we plan on recording that video we talked about in the previous post. Hopefully we’ll be able to include it in one of the coming recaps!

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!

Like we promised last week, it’s time for a new update for the beta! We introduce the bow, the boar enemy, a few small new areas and a lot of small fixes and minor polish.

For you guys who haven’t received a invite yet, this week we are inviting a whooping 70 new testers to join the others in the  quest of ironing out bugs and giving us valuable feedback. Check your inboxes over at Desura to see if you have received an invite.

Besides juicy beta news, production is moving forward. We’ve added the last layer of polish to the Evergrind South area, with flowing water and doses of wild life. Below is a before and after picture of the area.

Before (Click to enlarge)

After (Click to enlarge)

Vilya has begun creating art assets for yet another new area that’s coming up after we finish up the dungeon. With Swedish viking blood running through our veins, we wouldn’t feel at home without a proper winter landscape to collect away in.

Click to Enlarge

Since we finished school we have all spread out all around the place, Vilya even opted to leave Sweden in favor for the Netherlands.

We haven’t had any proper “office time” since we left, which has made a few things harder to design, the dungeon layouts being one of them.
Luckily, this week Fred will be heading out on a little business trip and stay at Teddy’s place to rap up as much “face to face”-needed design as possible. Day 1 is already coming to an end with a good amount of office hours and unhealthy amounts of caffeine. We’ll keep you guys posted on this grand adventure of ours!

Modeling is always an option if the whole “game development”-thing doesn’t work out. 

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:

After a few hectic days at Gamex, we would like to thank everybody who played the game, gave us feedback or just stopped by to talk to us. It was a blast as always seeing people play the game for the first time. Hopefully, we’ll be back again next year with a version near completion.

Even though we’ve had a pretty busy week, production never stops!

Vilya has begun working on graphical assets for our very first dungeon in the game, which is kind of super exciting! There’s still some other things we must rap up before we can start actually designing the dungeon it self, but we’ll get there soon enough.

In short (and without spoiling too much, but still spoiling) the first dungeon is a ancient military base, driven by magic technology. It is inhabited by strange military machines designed purely for combat. Since Grindea has been at peace for a long time, what the Ancients needed a military base for is somewhat of a mystery. A mystery for you to solve!

We did some experimenting with the colors and lighting before settling on somewhat of a darker tone.

The first version, above, which we discarded shortly after.

Second version, which we liked better! With enemy sketches and character added for effect.

We felt the second both fit the theme better, as well as helping the enemies stand out from the background. Of course, we still wanted it to feel like both the enemies and the environment belong together. Therefore we chose to use magical energy details in both the backdrop as well as the enemies themselves, to connect the two. Once again, we did some minor variations of the color of the energy, to help separate the two even further.

Besides the temple, Fred has done some NPC animations, as well as wrapping up the level 5 version of the Fireball spell.

One of the more popular requests in the beta has been more difficult content. The Arena Challenges stopped most players in their tracks (for a while), but the main adventure is tuned to be what we can best be described as “pretty challenging for the average gamer”. In other words, not very challenging for the hardcore crowd!

To cater to players on the masochistic side of the spectrum, we’ve added hard mode.

Since the enemies already scale quite extensively in multiplayer, we had a pretty good foundation to build on when adding this feature. In hard mode, nearly everything has been tuned at least slightly to make enemies more of a menace.

Apart from the basic/boring buff of slightly more HP (30 % for normal enemies), they also hit harder, move faster and have less glaring weaknesses. On normal, mastering perfect guard was an optional thing. On hard, enemies will make short work of your shield without it. Here’s a couple of examples to illustrate how the game changes quite a bit:

Exhibit A: Halloweeds have always been a terror on the battlefield, but at least you used to run faster than they could dig. Now if you turn your back on them, they will chase you down (and kill you). They also have half as long delay between attacks.

Exhibit B: Giga Slime (both versions) jumps quicker, the slow effect when stepping in his slime trails is twice as strong, the slow slime doesn’t disappear, he can use his hammer more frequently and its startup has been heavily reduced.

For now, personal satisfaction is the only reason to play on hard. It’s for the players that tend to get bored unless they must remain focused at all times to escape death.

Vilya has been busy creating the illustrations for all our enemy cards! Here’s previews of the Bloomo Card and the Scarecrow Card:

Fred has set up his computer for streaming, and last Friday he took it out for a spin!

Here’s a VOD of his legendary first stream, and below is the result from when he was sketching enemies for the Flying Temple:

Fred will announce on Twitter and Facebook when any future streams go live, so keep an eye out for the continuation of his streaming/DJ career!