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)!

Another week has past by with some decent progress being made! Teddy has been away to act as yet another judge, this time for the Swedish Game Awards which we happened to win last year. Best of luck to all the participants!

Vilya has been busy adding more touch ups to Mount Bloom. Below is a picture of an area that will hold one of the many side quests Mount Bloom has to offer. Crystal mining is risky business, even for seasoned Collectors!

Fred has been working on animations for a couple of upcoming skills, mainly from the One Handed Weapons-tree. Below are some effects for one of the new skills, at the moment named “Shadow Clone“.

We’ll hopefully be able to talk more in depth about them next week when they’ve been properly implemented into the game.

As some of you noticed, last week there was no recap, due to us all being invited to serve as judges at Gotland Game Conference, an event held each year at our old university! We all had a blast, but we couldn’t work that much on the game and as such didn’t feel we had enough to show. A huge congratulations to the well-deserved winners of the “Pwnage Award”, the first year students who made CoBots!

Now we’re back in the groove and working again, so here’s a taste of what we’re doing!

First off, since we’ve made a bunch new magic spells, we felt we needed to expand on the weapon skills as well. First in line is a two handed weapon skill which has been temporarily (and creatively) dubbed throw!

As always, click the image for an animated gif!

The reason for adding the throw skill was to add the potential of using ranged attacks with weapons. Currently it doesn’t have quite as long range as some of the spells, but it’s enough to open up some strategical options. The further you throw the weapon, the greater the damage will be when it hits. We’re toying with different ways to use the fact that you actually throw away your weapon!

It’s a pretty powerful spell considering it slices through all enemies in its path, so we’re considering having a significant mana cost that can be partially refunded by picking up the weapon again, or maybe even disabling the weapon from being used again until some time has passed or the player collects the weapon!

This could create some interesting gameplay, but at the same time we have to be careful not to cause unnecessary confusion or frustration. Expect this skill to have evolved quite a bit before final release!

In the meantime, Vilya has revisited the Winterland area and added a bunch of new props and decorations! Here’s a shot of some tribal inspired environment made to match the Frostling enemy which Fred’s been animating over the past few weeks.

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, we have finished up one of the last enemy designs for the Winterland. As of now we call them Frostlings!

They are agile little creatures with a taste for mischief. Avoiding to get hit and blocking are preferred when fighting these little trouble makers since they have a habit of stealing gold from Collectors venturing through the Winterland! If they nab some of your cash, you’ll have to whack them with something hard before they escape with your life savings.

These cuties will probably pop up during one of Fred’s streaming sessions in the near future, getting some animation work done together with the rest of the Winterland enemy lineup!

Teddy has spent some time reworking how resetting puzzles work. Instead of our old “instant reset” we’ve implanted a sort of Braid-like system. Besides looking way cooler, this allows players to undo single moves instead of fully resetting the puzzle when caught in a deadlock.

Before:

After:

Click the pictures to view the animated GIFs.

Besides all the secret cool stuff we are currently working on, Fred has been hard at work in the effects workshop. Below is a new animation for when the player receives special items/powers as well as a mixed bag of other effects!

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

New week, new area! We decided to venture underground for this one, but we still wanted to keep the lushes nature of an outdoors area. So we simply decided the combine the two, to create Mount Bloom.

Filled with enormous mushrooms and strange vegetation, the cave system of Mount Bloom is one of the oldest and largest in all of Grindea. Home to both hostile creatures  and friendly crystal miners in need of help, Mount Bloom is a true test for even the more experienced collectors. Poisonous spores act as a natural defense for anyone who ventures to deep and some even say the caves used to be nesting grounds for dragons.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally got a proper work station set up! While working on the kitchen table definitely had its perks, it’s nice to have the “office” up and running.

Since Vilya lives all the way down in the Netherworld, we have set up Teddy’s good old Netbook to act as a permanent satellite uplink!

Let’s start off with the game related stuff we can show off! Vilya has, among other things, created the temple entrance for the temple of seasons:

The symbols on the circles signify the different seasons, and we’ve got some mechanics in store for the temple that we hope will be fun to use :)

In other news, Teddy and Fred has gotten their new apartment in order for maximum Grindea grinding! A step in that direction has been to create two coffee tables themed after the game.

Above is a shot taken right after we finished them up

And here they are in their natural habitat (sorry for bad camera :[ )

We haven’t been slacking off, though! As promised, we’ve started working on the temple boss, but we don’t want to show it off just yet. How much do you guys want to see anyway? Are you afraid of spoilers? Do you want us to show everything?

Sometimes we feel that we’re showing off a bit too much, but maybe that’s what you guys following the dev blog want anyways!

It’s time again for our weekly recap – this time we have a bunch of random things, as well as some good news:

For a long while now we’ve had some pretty tough time communicating due to us living in 3 very different parts of Sweden. However, as of last week Fred and Teddy has finally moved back to Gotland and are now roomies – something which we really hope will improve the speed and quality of the production.

Their first mission will be to finish the main boss of the dungeon! We’ve been saving it since it needs a lot of fine tuning and screen pointing, which is cumbersome to do online.

As for the work we’ve done this week, here’s a bunch of random stuff:

Here’s the interior of the treestump previously seen in a screenshot of the Fae village. This is where the Elder Fae gather to keep order in the forest and among their kin.

And while we’re on the topic of Elder Fae, we’ve shown you 3 before, representing Winter, Spring and Summer. Here’s the last one, representing autumn:

In the animation department we have an effect which you’ll see in an upcoming mini-boss fight with the mysterious Phaseman:

There’s also this a scary-but-kind-of-cute enemy roaming the snow lands we’ve been working on lately:

Lastly, we present to you the Ice Spike skill, a spell which we actually completed a very long time ago, but which we haven’t included in the beta as of yet. This skill will make ice spikes appear in the direction you’re casting it.

Click on the image to see the animated gif if it doesn’t play automatically: