This week, things have been moving forward at a steady pace. Vilya has continued working away with putting together the dungeon interior as well as wiping together some more card art. Below is the cards for the Brawler bot and the Wisp, both enemies of our first dungeon.

Fred is back in the groove after fighting off school work for the last couple of weeks, working away at some heavy boss creating for the dungeon! We’ll probably keep all of the boss details on the down under to give you guys something to look forward and fantasize about, but we promise it will be big, mean and contain a lot of heavy weaponry.

So for the coming few weeks, the updates might be a bit less meaty since both Fred and Teddy will be hammering away at the super secret boss in joined forces. We will try to make it up to you by dishing out a new video (content unknown for now) in the near future, so stay alert!

Every monster needs its card, and minibosses or bosses are no exception! Here are the cards for Phaseman and Giga Slime:

As you can see, they have slightly more extravagant frames than regular cards, and we plan to make their effects a bit more awesome than most normal cards (although not ridiculously overpowered like the RO boss cards). Now you’re all probably thinking “but wait, what if I defeat the boss and don’t get a card? :(”

In order to let the completionists be completionists, we’re adding a Memory Room to the Collector’s HQ!

As you start out, the Memory Room is just a long corridor of empty pedestals, but for every miniboss or boss you defeat, a miniature trophy of it will appear on one of these pedestals. If you ever want to fight that battle again, either for the heck of it or because you want to get the card, you can activate the trophy and relive the battle!

Hopefully, by the time the game is done, there will be a ton of those pedestals to fill!

This week we’re jumping back into the flying dungeon!

We have planned ahead for what to do next, and Vilya started off making a bunch of drops that you’ll find as you slay your way through the area.

All of the items are either equipable, edible or build into something that is. Exactly what they are and what they’re used for is something you’ll have to find out for yourself, though! Can you guess already?

There’s also a hat:

Next week will be spent making cards and the very last few rooms of the dungeon. Hopefully by then Fred has done away with his remaining schoolwork so we’ll see some more animations too! Perhaps we’ll even start on the dungeon boss…

After gaining weight and laziness over the duration of our little break, it’s finally time to start getting back to work.

Vilya’s still trying to keep the spirit of christmas alive by making sprites for our winter area:

There’s christmas trees, snowmen, and lots and lots of snow, as you can see! Of course, no area is complete without hats, so it’s time we started making a few of those as well:

Another piece of development news, which will be very exciting to some, and not-so-exciting to others, is that we’re working on some translation tools! We’ve gotten quite a few offers to have fansub groups translate our game to various languages, and if there are fans out there who want to bring the game to their non-English speaking countrymen, why not let them?

Basically, it’s a set of tools that can be used by anyone to change dialogue (and other texts). You have access to everything you need, like coloring parts of the text, or adding conditional phrases (like having a character say different things depending on character gender, or how many is in your party). By saving it into the game’s language folder, you can then select it in game.

Our hopes are that the tools will be used to make better translations than we’d be able to get even if we hired someone to help us! In their final version, the goal is to have good support for collaboration, with options to merge different language files and keep the best translated lines.

Also, having an approach like this can let players choose between, say, a literal translation by one group and an idiomatic translation by another. Perhaps a fan with a great knack of dialogue writing will even release an improved English version!

What happened to the dungeon? Fear not, it hasn’t been forgotten! We’ll most likely get back to it in the coming week, after discussing how to proceed :)

The past week has mainly been focused on spending time with our families, eating good food and catching up with friends who are home over the holidays. While production have had to take a backseat for a brief moment, we have recharged our batteries and are ready for a new year of hard development. Hopefully, Santa Slime will be bringing a full release of Secrets of Grindea next year instead of lousy beta keys!

With that said, we’ve made some progress even though the holidays have been lurking around everywhere! The temple has steadily been getting a more finished renovation both inside and outside.

Vilya have also managed to squeeze out some card art for the Guardian enemy we showed a few weeks back. Bling-bling at its finest!

All in all, we would like to thank everybody for the support and feedback we have recivied through out this year. We read everything you guys say and take a lot of it to heart, be it good or bad things. If 2013 brings half of the love you’ve showed us during 2012, we will be more than happy. See you on the other side, happy new year!

Although we have gotten some work done this week, there won’t be a regular recap! Instead, we’ll just leave five beta keys lying around!

US680-8BL1X-J9SUF-CU0QH-INFD3
H4MS0-Q173B-F8HRD-FQ5GE-9BDY1
V1OKC-W9NAM-VE26C-47BCE-8LU74
P6H5H-FU063-7C66G-SUC4X-OS2PO
WUJYZ-ZT7YY-UAHPQ-R388Y-J8X6V

If you have a Desura account, you can redeem a key here~

Even though this handout is kind of random, we’d love it if you still treated it as a regular beta invite (that means giving us some feedback)!

Within 24 hours of redeeming the key, you’ll receive a message on Desura with some information about the beta, as well as an invite to a hidden forum on IndieDB where you can give us feedback or bug reports :)

Best of luck, and Happy Holidays!

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!

This week our work with the dungeon has continued! Fred and Teddy has kept crunching back in Visby, fiddling around with the various mechanics and animations for the enemies in the flying dungeon.

One of their latest creations is this little fellow, a robot that will feature as a mini-boss halfway (or so) through the dungeon!

The robot might not look like much in this form, but he’s a nasty one! He’s been programmed to transform himself into a swarm of magic orbs, beaming across the room while damaging everything in his way. Your only chance to kill him is in the scarce moments when he’s actually still in this physical form! But beware, he might have a surprise in store as you come close as well…

While the boys have been working on that, Vilya has been preparing the rooms in which the enemies will be found. Some of them can be seen here (click to enlarge the pictures):

This it the room that comes just before the boss room. You will begin your journey here and come back to it in the end, after you successfully managed to unlock the door by starting three different machines throughout the dungeon.

This room will house one of the puzzles of the dungeon, which is directly related to a skill you’ll learn here. The skill allows you to beam from one area in a room to another. How it will be done will be explained later – there will also be a visual cue where it is possible.

Expect to see more of the dungeon next week! :3

This week, we’ve finally started working at full speed on the first temple! We’ve got a ton of stuff down, most notably in the enemy department. Three new enemies have been prototyped, and we’re mostly done with the fourth and final normal temple enemy. After that, we’ll start designing the layout of the temple itself!

Here’s a screenshot with the three enemies we’ve made so far:

The enemies in the screenshot are the following:

Pecko (the bird)

The Pecko is a giant bird that has made the temple grounds its home, and is quite merciless when it comes to defending its territory! It’s a tanky, quite mobile enemy with a large attack range thanks to its ability to stretch its neck.

Wisp (the ball)

The Wisp is a small, fast harass unit that fires homing projectiles at players. Trying to fight tougher enemies with Wisp projectiles chasing makes any fight twice as tough, so you’ll want to hunt these things down quickly.

Guardian (the crystal)

The Guardian is a support enemy, which disrupts the battlefield in the enemy’s favor. They can switch between three modes:

Green crystals fire deadly beams between each other, cutting off areas and limiting player maneuverability, purple crystals create gravity fields which slow players down and blue crystals shield other enemy units (except other blue crystals), making them immune to damage until the shield wears off or the blue crystal is destroyed.

To be as effective as possible while crunching out these enemies, Fred made a pilgrimage to Visby and has been crashing at Teddy’s place for the past week! They filmed some of their exploits with Teddy’s crappy mobile camera. As a boon to you guys, we’ve used the clips to create a short “documentary” of the week:

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.