This week, we’ve been squeezing in some new magic spells into the game! If you’re a returning reader, you’ve probably seen some graphics of a couple of them.

Click the pictures to view them as animated images!

Here’s a Chain Lightning spell, working pretty much in the classic way! It will hit the closest enemy in front of you (and in range), and will then jump to new enemies until the max amount of jumps has been reached, or there are no more enemies to jump to.

Next is a Meteor spell, which has the same targeting system as the Earth Spike. However, unlike the Earth Spike, there’s a slight delay before it hits, so you need to plan ahead. On the plus side, it hits like a truck (that’s crashing down from the sky)!

Lastly, here’s the Plant Summon in action! Unlike the Cloud, you can summon a bunch of these babies, but they are stationary and can’t follow you around. Use them like traps and bait enemies into them!

Meanwhile in Fairyland, more portraits have been raining in! Here’s the Summer Elder, worried that winter will never end:

And here’s a regular Summer Fae, sharing her elder’s discomfort with the sudden cold snap:

As this week’s parting gift, please accept this little animation of a Brawler Bot waking up from a long, long slumber!

Vilya has kept busy with some more portraits this week. These two sparkling looking fellows below are two of the Fae elders, there are four of them in total. They all represent one season each, can you guess which?

Since we’re starting to have quite a few characters in the game now, we’ve been considering ways to make it visually clear who are more important than others. As a result we’ll most likely go over the portraits once more and make the main characters stand out a bit more in terms of detail and design, and, on the other end, make sure that the lesser characters aren’t too fancy.

While this revamp will probably have to wait until the last stages of development we’re definitely keeping this in mind for our future character designs, and have already done so in regards of the Fae: while the two Fae’s pictured above are important to the storyline and the Fae society in general, there two are not:


How do you feel about us differentiating main character vs filler/sidequest characters this way?

We’ve seen many different methods used in games, all ranging from side characters not having portraits at all, to letting them be extremely drab or even have the same 4-5 portraits reused for all characters that aren’t important to the plot. At the moment we think what we mentioned above is the best way for our game, but we’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!

Fred on the other hand has been busy with some outside projects. Below is the final assignment for an animation course he has been taking the last few months! It’s a bit choppy at times due to some exporting issues from Flash, but we hope you’ll enjoy it in spite of that :)

Be prepared for some glorious Grindea animations when the game is closing in on release!

This week, we’ll take a first glance at a less dangerous part of the Winterland, a yet to be namned village area!

This place is inhabited by the race of Faes. Despite being about as tall as an apple, they play a pretty major role in the world of Grindea.

Below is a screenshot of the village, as well as a portrait and some sprites of its tiny population.

Staying with the winter stuff, Teddy has been adding a bit more flair to the area by putting together some weather effects. No winter area is complete with a proper snow effect after all!

Click the image to view the animation

This week we’ve continued on our different paths. Vilya has continued with the snow area, creating a bunch of fishes for you to catch:

There’s also two more portraits to see:

Can you guess who they are..? ;)

Next up for Vilya is making a new village, hidden among the snowy trees with some quite interesting inhabitants… More on that later!

Fred, on the other hand, has started on something new: more skills! We want all skills in the game to be unlocked on level one – and we still have a long way to go before that’s achieved – but as of this week we’re a little closer!

Here’s the new skills:

This skill is part of the fire tree and calls forth a flaming meteor from the skies and deal aoe damage.

Here’s a second earth skill with whom you’ll summon plants that will help you fight!

We’ve also sent out requests to our sound designers for more sound effects so that we can get that promised video rolling as soon as possible. How long it takes largely depends on how long it takes before we receive the sounds though, so hang in there!

Another week has come to pass, and with it the usual teasers of the work we’ve done!

Animation wise, Fred is churning on with cleaning up and adding flair to the dungeon. Below is a small buffet of some of the effects created this week!

At the same time, things are continuing to shape up in the Winterland. For the ice, we’ve added a reflection shader to give it a more interesting look! For those who enjoy the fishing minigame, this lake offers a chilly continuation of that little pastime :)

The inhabitants of said Winterland are also beginning to take shapes, and several have already gotten faces! Here’s the owner of the cupcake house, and also the competitive younger brother of a certain other connoisseur of sweets and pastries already in the game…

And here’s a couple who lives with their kids in a small cottage, unable to afford anything closer to the city after running into some bad fortune :(

Now, onto bigger topics:

Let’s talk about release dates

We’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding the release date lately. Most of you are simply wondering if we have an exact date, while others are very upset about us not having released the game yet. Both Facebook and our Greenlight page have been getting a fair share of these posts, and we’re beginning to feel it might’ve been a mistake to ever making an estimate in the first place!

Our stance on when we’ll release the game has ultimately been the old Blizzard saying “when it’s done“, but we’ve tried making some estimates as to when that might be. Turns out we’re better at making games than guessing release dates! Looking at most other games, this seems to come with the job…

Please rest assured that no-one wants to see this game released more than we do. Eating food other than this week’s bargains? Having money to attend trade shows like PAX and GDC? Long term financial stability? Heck, sign us up!

However, what’s more important to us than these things is releasing a product you’ll enjoy, and we’re proud of. What point is all this effort we’re putting in if the game isn’t what it should have been?

So, without further ado, we’re removing all estimates of when the game will be released! It’ll return to and stay “To Be Announced” until we’ve come to a point where we positively can give you a reliable time.

This doesn’t mean we’re planning to slack off or anything, but just that we understand the frustration some fans have felt regarding delays, and this is the only course of action guaranteed to prevent that from happening.

While the Winterland is a cold and harsh landscape, there’s quite nothing like snuggling up under a blanket in front of the fireplace inside one of the cozy buildings the area has to offer. Below are the insides of two of those, the Cupcake Store as well as something a bit more christmasy!

Jumping over to the temple, enemies won’t be the only dangers to worry about for the players. Puzzles and traps will be in full display, so watch your steps!

The past week the Winterland has kept on growing and it’s really starting to take shape! We mentioned interesting landmarks and whatnot in the last post, so here is one more of those!

We won’t go too deep about what juicy secrets are hiding inside this delicious structure, let’s just say that will get some fierce competition on the sweets market!

The last polish of the temple has also been going forward, getting closer and closer to completion. Here’s a few more cleaned up animations from some of the enemies:

This week, the Winterland has kept getting attention and kept growing. We have tried our best to make sure that there are lots of interesting landmarks and quests to be found through out the area, even more so then in the Halloween Forest. Without spoiling too much, here’s a screen of a somewhat recognizable sled!

Fred is still focusing on the first temple, this week mainly containing of cleaning up enemy animations.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally found an apartment  to set up base in. We’ll dig more into detail about it when the big moving date arrives, but in short it will make problem solving and fine tuning much easier as well as increasing our work pace!

Being more or less done with the backdrops and decorations for the temple, Vilya has gone into snowstorm overdrive to finalize the look of our winter region! We’re really pleased with both the look and the layout of the areas, and we’re confident that we can fill them with some pretty interesting content. Players will be able  to reach the winterland after completing the first dungeon.

Meanwhile, Fred is making some finishing touches on the dungeon polish by creating unique death animations for most of the enemies!

Next week will follow in the same snowy footprints, don’t forget your hats!

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!