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

So we’re currently waiting for Desura to approve our latest build, and when they do, the beta will officially start! We were originally planning on inviting only a few people this week, to test things out, but due to the inspiring amount of interest, we’re going to increase that cap.

To give you an idea of how much it has overshot our expectations, we were expecting around 30 people at best, and we currently have 490 usernames in our list. On the plus side, this means the game will become better, since we’ll have a larger feedback group, but even though we’ll invite larger groups it still means the chances of getting in quickly is reduced somewhat.

So, to give you an idea, we’ll invite 15-20 people within the next couple of days. This is mainly to make sure the technical and administrative aspects work as we want them to, such as: Can random users download and start the game? Does our “First Impressions”-thread generate the information we want? Is there a need for more forum categories?

If things work out the way we want them, we’ll invite about 30 more people next week, and then we’ll keep inviting new people whenever we need some new feedback and “first impressions”. We’re not 100 % sure about the intervals yet!

The invites will be sent via Desura/IndieDB, so check your messages there if you’ve registered! You’ll be invited to a closed group as well as the game, which contains a forum for you to discuss the game with us and other users.

Production

Production wise, the past week has been much about adding some polish and trying to make sure the new stuff was ready for the Desura upload, as well as fleshing out the amount of quests to do, items to craft, and so forth!

Here’s one of the enemy cards you can find (Rabby):

And here’s some of the new fishes you can find in the various lakes!

As for animations, Fred decided to give the old chicken coop some flare for when you herd chickens into it. Yes, you heard right. We have chicken herding in the game!

We’re quite overwhelmed (and humbled) by the great reception of the video we posted last week. Most people seemed positively surprised at the combat system currently in place! There’s a couple of other subject we’d love to do spotlights on, so if we can find the time, expect some more videos in the future! :)

Now, let’s talk about the new things we’ve got to show this week. First off, we put the stylist to work! After months of just looking pretty in his booth, you can finally visit him to change your appearance.

You can both change hairstyle, or dye your hair or any of your clothes. Getting a haircut costs money, but changing colors is free!

Both getting a haircut and changing the color of something is a pretty straightforward affair, and you’re able to see the end results by looking at the preview to the right!

Apart from ending Franciscos welfare run, we also added something that’s been a long time coming: achievements! In the game, we call them ”trophies”, because we’re crazy like that.

The basic system probably doesn’t need an explanation, but here it is anyway: it’s a series of challenges geared towards obsessive people like ourselves. Usually though, most games give the player a nice sound, a pop-up and an entry somewhere and call it a day. We wanted to add something extra, and so every achievement comes with some form of reward.

Also, we have plans for some kind of housing system, where some achievements will give you actual trophies or decorations to put on display there! More on that when it actually exists…

Let’s stay true to tradition and finish the recap off with an animation! This time, it’s a new one handed weapon, The Stinger (quite literally)!

Tomorrow we’ll set up a way for you to register for the beta launch!

Stay tuned!

Settling on a difficulty for a game is tough. We’re not making Super Meat Boy, where difficulty is a major selling point, but we don’t want to make the game a casual stroll in the park either.

What we’re going for now is tough for a casual player and challenging for an average player, but probably a tad bit too easy for hardcore gamers.

In order to add some extra mileage for those wanting to push their characters to the limit without putting huge road blocks in front of “normal” players, we added a feature to the arena called Challenges!

At the top level, you can select between Challenges and Versus.

Challenges are just that. Designed trials where your performance will be graded! In multiplayer, you’ll cooperate in these.

Versus is a collection of mini games where you can challenge your friends to a farm-off, the noble art of chicken herding and other wacky mini games! We might cover this in more detail some other time.

In the Challenge menu, you’ll see a list of all unlocked challenges, together with your current best grade (the grades go from ‘C’ to ‘S’). You’ll unlock more challenges as you progress through the story!

Most challenges will be tied to the combat mechanics of the game. For example, you might fight through waves of difficult enemy constellations, or battle a nightmare version of a boss!

When you’ve completed the challenge, you’ll get to see a scoreboard with your grades!

When you return to the arena reception, you’ll receive different items depending on what grade you got. Whenever you beat a challenge on S-rank for the first time, you’ll be rewarded with a unique item!

To move on to a completely different subject, we’re going to do the unthinkable and actually posting some info regarding the beta!

A while back we contacted Steam to see if we could run the beta on their platform. This was just before them announcing Greenlight, and as such, six weeks later we received a template reply telling us to check that service out.

Now, Greenlight seems great. However, it isn’t launching until the end of August (+Valve Time?), and there’s also no way of guessing right now how much Greenlight interest we must garner before being put on Steam, and how happy they are with indies prancing around running betas on there. While our skill at postponing betas is at Olympic level, even we didn’t want to delay it indefinitely!

So, we couldn’t do Steam, but we still wanted some centralized platform with automatic patching and ability to select users to invite. An indie friendly alternative to Steam that does just this is Desura.

Desura is pretty similar to Steam in many ways, and should be a pretty familiar experience for most players used to Valve’s platform. We’ve set up an IndieDB-page for the game in preparation. This is probably also where we’ll open up forums for our beta testers!

The beta isn’t running quite yet, but as you can tell things are moving along! We still have a few things to throw into the mix as far as the game goes. In the coming few weeks, we’ll give you more detailed information on how to register for the beta (we don’t know yet :D ), and shortly after that we’ll be throwing out the invites!

Wow, today’s post became really long… glad you made it to the end! See you next week! :)

This week, we’ll simply distract you with some art while we finish off a couple of more quests for you to enjoy in that legendary beta…! ;3

Fred’s main focus this week has been revisiting our beloved Evergrind City and creating more flavor animations for the people living there.

And Vilya has finally finished remaking the portraits!

We’re celebrating that by starting some new interface work that you’ll hopefully be able to see next time :)

One of the few problems with a magic bag full of loot is figuring out what to do with all your junk. Luckily, there is a great remedy for this issue: turning your junk into new kinds of junk, also known as crafting!

In Grindea, you can visit certain NPCs which will help you craft items close to their expertise. Mr Fabulous, the Evergrind hatter, will let you craft hats for example.

The screenshot above is the crafting view at his shop. You don’t need to unlock recipes in order to craft stuff. Instead, any recipe with at least one item that you already own will appear in the list. The little bar below the item icon is an indicator on how close you are to being able to craft this item! If you don’t have enough ingredients to craft an item, it will show up only as a silhouette. When you’ve gathered all the items required, the bar will turn green and the real icon will appear.

When you press on an item, you will be able to view more detailed information of what the ingredients are, how many you need, and how many you own of each ingredient. Of course, you can view this information even if you haven’t collected all the ingredients yet! If you have all the required parts, you can craft the item. In this case, a sweet slime hat!

Another crafting feature we implemented at the same time was the ability to browse recipes based on ingredient directly from your inventory!

When you press on an item that’s a part of any recipe, you’ll get an option called “Recipes”. Selecting this option will take you to a nifty little recipe browser, listing all items in the game that can be created using that particular item.

Note that even if you don’t have all the ingredients for an item, you can still see what type it is, as well as what stats it will have when you craft it. We don’t want players to farm blindly for an hour to make a new sword, only to find out that the weapon they had used to bash all those slimes had been better all along!

(…of course, a true collector will want to craft everything just for the bragging rights) :3

Crafting, like much else, is not mandatory in order to complete the main story. Neither will it be a breaking powergaming feature like in some modern RPGs, where crafting makes even the rarest of unique drops obsolete. We’ll try to create a balance where both crafted equipment and rare gear are equally powerful. Now, if you craft something from the rarest of components, however…

As promised, we’ve been crunching away with the Halloween Forest this week! We’ve got the basic color scheme and props down, as well as nearly all of the enemies that will inhabit the region.

Apart from this screen, we’ve iterated the whole forest layout to something we feel pretty confident will work out, so what’s left now props wise is mostly bigger set pieces, like the witch’s cottage, and putting everything together in a nice way!

Here’s the enemy lineup Fred’s been working on

And below are idle animations for a couple of them!

• The pumpkin will be a cannonfodder-type enemy, which means there will be quite a lot of them, and they are pretty straightforward to defeat (but certainly more deadly than slimes and rabbits)
• The flying jack o’ lantern is a ranged type, and fires small projectiles at the players. He also scales with the number of players, shooting more projectiles if there are many players. His flames can be blocked with a shield, or even reflected if timed properly!
• The scarecrow is a tanky, melee type that can withstand several hits before going into hitstun. Using the shield to find openings is a dominant strategy here.
• Finally, the ghost is a harass type enemy, which stays invisible until it is in position for an attack. It appears as it charges, so you have some time to react, but will fade away again soon after the attack is finished. You’ll want to dispose of these buggers as soon as you see them! They are trickster ghosts of sorts, waiting around for unwary travelers to play with.

We’ll also be adding a plant enemy called Halloweed, which is an upgraded version of the flower you might’ve spotted in our videos. We’re still trying to nail his color scheme though, hence his absense in the lineup! He’ll use his vines to whack players that are close to him, but unlike his less agile brother, this guy will burrow and chase you underground if you’re out of his reach for too long!

Encountering all of these enemies all at once would certainly be a daunting (and frustrating) challenge, so we’ll spread them out a bit and try to make sure the spawn compositions are varied and well balanced!

Next Week: Even more halloween stuff will see the light!

Due to an unexpected turn of events, we’ve done some redecorating in our schedule. We’ve got a golden opportunity of merging working on Grindea with schoolwork, and we felt we had to take it! The flip side was that, since it’s a project course, we needed a somewhat isolated element of the game that would take about five weeks to complete.

We’ve chosen to create a new field in the game, and as such, the stuff we had planned to do will be frozen until this course is done. It’s mostly good news, since we’ll get more done, and all of us sort of secretly wanted to work on new environments and enemies. The updates will probably be more interesting as well, for that matter! However, due to this arrangement, we’ll postpone the beta testing as well. :(

To get our minds of that dark lining of the silver cloud, here are three very anatomically correct ferrets on top of each other!

This is our logo! We’ll have to throw together some nice font that says “Pixel Ferrets” too, but this is the core! We felt it was about time to get one, being nine months into development and all.

Now back to our plans for the coming weeks:

The area we’re going to create is temporarily called the Halloween Forest, but we plan on changing the name to something a bit more fun later on! The zone is somewhat scary (as you probably figured out from the name) yet still cute. The enemies and decorations will include things such as pumpkins, lanterns, candle lights, scarecrows, ghosts, mist and spooky trees. This is the home of the odd Candy Witch, a couple of wicked twins and a mysterious hooded man. It’s also here you will have the chance of helping a lonely scarecrow in a quest!

This is one of our favourite areas (at least to talk about) so we’re looking forward to a few entertaining weeks for all of us. We hope you’ll will like it as much as we do!

In-between all the planning of our new schedules and preparation for the new course, Fred has kick started operation Halloween Forest with its very first inhabitant, a little jumpin’ pumpkin!

There’s plenty more enemies to come during the following weeks; we have a total of five planned for this area.

Next Week: Enemies! Trees! Stuff! Halloween!

Another week has rushed past, and the battle with the GUI continues! We’re pretty much wrapping up the main menu, and are moving on to in-game stuff. Due to our passionate and undying love for interface work, we also decided to redesign how keyboard vs. controller works in the game.

But let’s get the main menu out of the way, first!

Click image to enlarge!

This here is the multiplayer lobby! Players can gather there before starting a game, and adjust a couple of multiplayer settings. Of course, if you don’t like waiting for that dude who’s just gonna “grab a sandwich or something”, you can start the game and have your friends connect to you while you’re playing!

The first option you have is Item Share. It can be set to either Each Take, where all items go to whatever player that picks them up, or Round Robin, which distributes items fairly and randomly.

Secondly we have Mentorship, which if turned on will synchronize the combat efficiency of all characters to roughly the same level as the lowest leveled character. This is useful for players who want to play together, but haven’t gotten equally far into the game. Instead of having to start over from the beginning, they can play from where the lower leveled player is in the story without the higher leveled one wreaking havoc and potentially ruin the experience for his friend.

That sums up the lobby pretty well, so let’s head on to the HUD-changes by showing two screens of the different setups:

Gamepad HUD

Keyboard HUD

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally decided to completely separate the control schemes for keyboard and gamepads. Up until now, we’ve had emulator-like controls on the keyboard, which worked sort of well, but certainly not as well as it could. This meet-halway-there approach limited our options with the controller as well, so this was the right thing to do.

The new keyboard HUD looks and works similar to modern RPGs and MMOs, where you have a bar with abilities which you activate with hotkeys (which you can bind however you want — in the picture I’ve used keys close to those I use for the sword and shield). You can have up to ten quickslots set at a time, and a quickslot can contain either a skill, a consumable item or a weapon.

The gamepad HUD looks like it used to, and also has ten quickslots. The first two can be used by just pressing a button, and two sets of four more quickslots can be accessed by holding the left or the right trigger before pressing the button. We might do a video of this later to show it in action.

Luckily, it’s not all GUIs in ferretland. Fred has spent some time making a few cool, new weapons for players to use!

Next Week: Even moar GUI-work! Woohoo! Fred will be making the rest of the animations for our new weapons

Hello and happy valentines day to everyone (one day early, but hey)!
Sadly(?), today’s update does not have a lot to do with romance. Instead, we focus on character creation, since it has been our main focus this week!

The week started off with Vilya creating and later adjusting haircuts together with Fred. A few mishaps later they ended up spending almost three entire days (not even kidding) adjusting clothing colors. Imagine how tired they are of that by now!

In the end everything turned our quite well though! We currently have 30 different clothing colors (per item) to pick from and 8 different haircuts per gender. There will be more as we move on though, so fear not! Hopefully you will all have a favorite style before we’re done with the game ;3

Anyway, there really isn’t much more to say. Instead, have a look at this video with commentary by Fred, which shows everything you need to know about the character creation:

Other than that, a lot of you guys asked us about the beta last week and how to get into it. Because we wanna start off small, we’ll begin with inviting people we know and have worked with previously. After that, we’ll expand more and include people from outside our circles. When the time is near we’ll let you know of a way to sign up, don’t worry!

Next week: We remake the GUI for keyboard users and add more skills!