We’ve mentioned before that we are putting a lot of effort into making our quests and side quests stand out from the regular “Collect X and return here”-formula. While Collect Quests will be present (you are playing as a Collector after all!) they will not appear as frequently as in your average RPG.

The Winterland will be no different, with a bunch of different tasks for the players to handle. One of those tasks involves cleaning up the old Toy Factory and shutting down the Christmas Gift Machine within that has gone berserk!

Staying within the Winterland, Vilya has been hard at work putting together some proper cards for some of the beloved monsters roaming around in the snow!

Finally, we’re also keeping up the effort to gradually bring old stuff up to par. For example, we’ve  reworked how the Teleport Plates gets activated and we’ve given the fireball spell a trail effect, making it feel a bit more fancy:

 BEFORE:

AFTER:

Click to view as animated gifs

Since the Dad character got an all new look last week, Fred took the time to put together a brand new sprite to go with it!

Besides reworking some other older animations in need of touch ups, Fred also went ahead and made graphics for some trap-like hazards we’re adding to the game.

The roots will act as a blockade that players either have to destroy or move around. The spiked version will deal damage if walked into, and the beehive will rapidly spawn Bees until the hive itself is destroyed.

Since your reaction to the rogue-like mode/endless dungeon was so positive, we’ve also put together a little prototype of such a mode to measure the potential. Here’s a screenshot of how it currently looks:

Click to view in full size!

We’ve decided to make it a room-to-room affair, much how it works in The Binding of Isaac, partly for productivity reasons. Basically, each room presents the player with a challenge (usually battling a group of monsters). The drop rates have been adjusted so that interesting items drop more often, and every enemy also have a small chance to drop a random piece of equipment suited to the floor.

In the screenshot, you can also see the thorns showcased earlier in the post. Traps and obstacles are used to avoid having most rooms looking exactly the same.

Another source of variation visible in the screenshot is elite mobs, based on a suggestion by JayneM over at the beta forums. It’s a more streamlined version of the microbosses we talked about a few weeks back. Every monster has a small chance of spawning as an elite enemy, giving them changes to their stats and behavior. The bee (pink aura) in the screenshot moves faster, has more HP and a much shorter wind-up time for its dive attack. The elite version of the Green Slime will leave trails of extremely slowing goo behind when it moves, making the encounter more challenging the longer you leave it alive.

Apart from being significantly stronger, elite mobs have really high drop rates on all their items and gold, while also granting more exp if killed.

Other stuff we’re also considering adding are different types of shops, semi-random puzzles with time limits, challenge rooms, performance based scoring, etc.

If you have any more suggestions for us, don’t hesitate to drop a comment!

This week, the yeti marks the end of enemy design with a slam, and we’ve also made a quick redesign of the main character’s dad:

Apart from asset creation, we’ve also brainstormed quite a bit regarding replayability. The endgame content of Grindea has always been an important part for us, and we want players to have a ton of stuff to strive for after the main story has been completed. One of our endgame features has been something we call Endless Tower, in which players will fight through an seemingly endless amount of rooms filled with different enemy composition. The difficulty increases by each passing room, as does the rewards for completing them.

While discussing this feature, we realized in how many ways this was similar to a classic rogue-like, and began exploring how the idea might be turned into a separate game mode. Players would need to fight through floors consisting of a number of different rooms, each room being filled with enemies, traps, puzzles or other tasks for the players to complete. The floor layouts would be randomly generated each play through, making every session unique.

This mode would also feature permadeath, meaning if you die once your character will be gone forever. You will start every play through with a new level 1 character, so you won’t have to worry about killing of your regular, uber-farmed characters. Since this mode is meant to be played during short sessions we will adjust a lot of the droprates to better fit the fast paced action. Gear and cards will drop a lot more frequently, while the health orbs might be more rare!

There are many good reasons to add this mode. Since we already have the Endless Tower planned and we’ll use the same enemies and environments as the fully hand crafted story mode, adding it will require very little development time while providing a huge boost to the replayability. If we ever decide to open the game up for pre order early-access, it would also be a good way to give early adopters something to entertain themselves with between patches.

If any of you rogue-like fans out there have any additional ideas, feel free to let us know through the comments! We’re always interested in hearing your feedback :)

After a few weeks of vacation and rest, we’ve been itching to get back to work! First of, we would like to thank all of you who played the beta and took time to write your first impressions. We’ve been going over all the feedback and there’s been tons of useful suggestions from everyone. We’ve already decided upon a few big changes, revamping the early parts of the game a bit to make the story more present being one of them. So once again, thank you.

In other work related news!
With just a few animations missing here and there, the Winterland enemies are getting very close to completion. Below are some animations for the Christmas present enemy we showed a while back.

We’ve also decided to add another version of the Christmas present in form of a ranged, green sibling.

We hope you have all enjoyed this summer as much as we have! Stay tuned for more updates and weekly recaps as usual from now on :)

The beta update is up and running! Earlier during the week we sent away a big batch of beta keys to people signed up in our beta thread. If you’ve received a key you will be notified by mail.

We would also like to ask all newly dubbed beta testers to join the beta group and write your first impressions about the game! Your feedback helps us push the game further and keep improving it, so we truly value it. You have received information about how to join the group in the beta invitation mail.

With that said, we are going to focus on going through feedback and maintaining the beta while we take a bit of vacation time while the summer still lingers around here in Sweden. We’re going to recharge out batteries for a short while before we begin our climb towards the next big milestone!

A mega hamburger dinner is a good step one in the recharging process!

Keep having an awesome summer guys!

Hello guys! This week we’ve been busy finishing off the last remaining things in and around the dungeon. There are still some tweaks we’d like to add, but for now the dungeon is complete and ready to be tested!

This means that at long last, it’s time to update the beta! To celebrate this new patch we’re gonna invite a bunch of new people that get to try the game out – hopefully you’re among them! :)

The beta should be uploaded before the end of the week, and invites will be sent shortly after. If you haven’t signed up for beta access yet, be sure to post a message in this thread over at Desura to have a chance of being selected!

Now, we’re also moving on with more stuff for the winter fields which we’ve shown you previously! It won’t be included in this patch, but here’s another sneak peek of what you’ll find there:

Yeti death animation!

A special attack which will freeze you if you’re not careful!

A bunch of random drops

One of the secrets we’re most excited about adding to Grindea are the microbosses!

Microbosses are unique enemies that are usually related to the normal mobs in some way, but are way stronger. A tiny taste of this that’s currently in the beta is the white rabby. 

He might look cute and fluffy, but he’s the #2 cause of death in the game

Most players enjoy the addition of the white rabby, but he’s not quite as interesting as we want most microbosses to be, since he has no extra moves except some tweaked base properties (more mobility, more health, more damage, more stun resistance etc).

During the past week, one of Fred’s tasks has been to create a microboss we hope will be a better example of what we want to achieve: the Frostling Leader!

 

The Frostling Leader will have a moveset inspired by the two regular Frostling monsters, the melee Rogue and the ranged Scoundrel. Our hope is to have it nearly as interesting to fight as a full fledged miniboss, but with way less workload regarding the visual design. A win-win situation if we ever heard of one!

As the game has grown larger, the need for a quicktravel has become more and more apparent. We’ve always planned to include such a system, and since you need it to travel back and forth to the flying temple now was the time to actually implement it!

In order to get a neat looking and functional interface for the quick travel, we also needed another detail we’ve postponed for a long time: the World Map!

At the start of the game, you can only see Startington and Pillar Mountains, but as you visit new areas the fog disappears and you can view them on your World Map. During your travels, you’ll also run into so-called Teleport Plates.

By stepping on such a plate, you’ll activate it, adding a new quicktravel node to your map! Afterwards, you can visit the map to create a teleportation field to that location.

You can’t teleport at any time, though. For example, you can’t teleport when stuck in a challenge or fighting a boss!

One of our game’s big selling points have been a lively atmosphere made possible through tons of flavor animations. In that spirit, the snowlands have been coming to life with some new NPC animations over the past week!

Santa isn’t quite santa unless he’s laughing

Scotty is shoveling an impressive amount of snow outside of his cabin

You can make the world come alive with other things than just NPCs!
Squirrels, for example

Apart from this, Fred also recorded a short video explaining the role of Puzzle Skills in Secrets of Grindea!

This week, the Winterland enemies have spent some quality time in the animation workshop!

The Yeti, which still doesn’t have a proper name, have learned how to walk! We can’t wait to get this marshmallow bear walking around in the game, smashing players to left and right!

Besides our furry friend, a RPG favorite makes another appearance. The Blue Slime are a more dangerous version of their distant cousin, the Green Slime. The major things that sets them apart is the Blue Slimes ability to turn into a sharp, icicle-like shape whenever it attacks.

The Slime family tree is one of the more diverse in all of Grindea, so expect to run into one or two more relatives to these guys. They should not be taken lightly, despite their status as “n00b mobs” within most RPGs. Every breed of Slime has their own special attacks, so beware!