One of the things we believe make a game more interesting is mini-games. And no game is complete without some good old target practice games! Therefore we have spent some time making such a game for the newly reintroduced bow. This mini-game can be found at the same location you find your bow, in this archer’s cottage just south of Evergrind City:

The archer also works part-time doing wall paintings…

The game is pretty straight forward as of now: You get a limited number of arrows which you can use to hit the various slime boards that pass you by.

You score more points depending on which color slime you hit, with the blue slimes in the back giving the most points. Of course, they’re also the hardest to hit – not only do they get covered by the two rows closer to you, they also move a lot faster.

If you’re skilled enough and hit several slimes in a row within a short time frame, you’ll score additional combo points.

We look forward to seeing your high scores in the beta forums once the patch is up and running ;)

Other than that, here are some new hats which might make it to the patch:

Gamex was a total blast! Watching people play was great as always (and a sober reminder that not everyone is as good at video games as our beta testers), and we were even lucky enough to meet some fans (and gain some new ones)! Thanks to everyone who showed up :)

This past week, we’ve been a bit all over the place, fixing some details we noticed people having trouble with at Gamex, sketching up some of the final charge skills, and so forth. The coming couple of weeks, we’re going to focus on getting everything done on the two new areas so we can finally patch that in and let our beta testers sink their teeth in it!

One of the major things we’ve worked on is updating the gamepad support to how the game has evolved. The game actually started out with proper gamepad support, but after some major changes to the gameplay it fell behind and needed an overhaul to catch up.

When playing with a keyboard, you assign hotkeys for your spells and use those. There are not quite as many buttons on a gamepad as there is on a keyboard though, so we needed a different solution than just mapping the skills to one button each. Instead, we use the left and right triggers to switch between skill sets. This way, the four buttons (A, B, X and Y on an Xbox-controller) effectively become twelve!

The screen above depicts the equipment screen when using a gamepad. Instead of two rows, the quickslots are now separated into three groups: no trigger, left trigger and right trigger. In the example, we’ve separated the potions to use its own group, accessed with the right trigger.

When holding down a trigger in game, the HUD changes accordingly. Below is a depiction on how it changes, based on the setup we had in the screenshot above. The order is Default (no trigger), Left Trigger, and Right Trigger.

The game will automatically detect what input method you’re currently using, and switch the GUI and help texts to match it. You can swap between gamepad and keyboard as you please!

To round things off, here’s a sneeze animation for the cowboy from last week (working bare chested has its drawbacks) as well as a few cards dropped from enemies in the Pumpkin Woods! From left to right: Jumpkin, Ghosty and Lantern Jack!

After a few hectic days at Gamex, we would like to thank everybody who played the game, gave us feedback or just stopped by to talk to us. It was a blast as always seeing people play the game for the first time. Hopefully, we’ll be back again next year with a version near completion.

Even though we’ve had a pretty busy week, production never stops!

Vilya has begun working on graphical assets for our very first dungeon in the game, which is kind of super exciting! There’s still some other things we must rap up before we can start actually designing the dungeon it self, but we’ll get there soon enough.

In short (and without spoiling too much, but still spoiling) the first dungeon is a ancient military base, driven by magic technology. It is inhabited by strange military machines designed purely for combat. Since Grindea has been at peace for a long time, what the Ancients needed a military base for is somewhat of a mystery. A mystery for you to solve!

We did some experimenting with the colors and lighting before settling on somewhat of a darker tone.

The first version, above, which we discarded shortly after.

Second version, which we liked better! With enemy sketches and character added for effect.

We felt the second both fit the theme better, as well as helping the enemies stand out from the background. Of course, we still wanted it to feel like both the enemies and the environment belong together. Therefore we chose to use magical energy details in both the backdrop as well as the enemies themselves, to connect the two. Once again, we did some minor variations of the color of the energy, to help separate the two even further.

Besides the temple, Fred has done some NPC animations, as well as wrapping up the level 5 version of the Fireball spell.

Starting tomorrow (Thursday), and for four days straight, Secrets of Grindea will be shown on Gamex, a Swedish video game trade fair taking place in Kista, Stockholm!

The game will be running all days, in the HGO Game monter (E34).

On Thursday, Teddy will be there, and on Saturday both Teddy and Fred will man the booth (when they’re not shredding GuitarSmith or blowing up scrubs in Mario Kart). On Friday and Sunday, our good pals from the school will keep an eye on things!

If you’re in town and going to Gamex, don’t hesitate to stop by and try it out!

More information on Gamex can be found here

Since we started posting updates (almost a year ago now, wow!) we have received a lot of suggestions and requests, which is awesome! Today we’re gonna address two of the things that has been brought up quite a bit.

First, we’ve often gotten requests to include a long-ranged weapon: most often a bow. And so, this week we have finally started experimenting with bringing the bow back into the game!

For various reasons we cut it out for a long while, but now we’re almost ready to have it reintroduced. This time cooler and better than ever! However, it has limited ammo and won’t include any skills of its own: instead you can upgrade it once in a while throughout the game. Currently you may equip and use the bow in the same way you do skills, through quickslots!

Fred has also been working on improving the graphics and the overall feel of wielding it, and we’re quite impressed. Take a look at this:

The second thing we’d like to address is casting spells or skills.

As some of you may know, we have a cast system in which you hold down a button until you’re ready to release the spell; the longer you charge, the better attack. However, you haven’t been able to move while casting, which is something that has caused a bit of complaints both from beta testers and people watching our videos.

After some consideration we did realize that it is a little limiting: it often forces you to wait for enemies to get in position, or you have to instantly burn off a low level spell to get away from damage..

So to solve this: you can now walk around while casting! Yay!

We hope you guys like these improvements as per your requests, and as a bonus, have these cards that Vilya has been working on! Until next time~

One of the more popular requests in the beta has been more difficult content. The Arena Challenges stopped most players in their tracks (for a while), but the main adventure is tuned to be what we can best be described as “pretty challenging for the average gamer”. In other words, not very challenging for the hardcore crowd!

To cater to players on the masochistic side of the spectrum, we’ve added hard mode.

Since the enemies already scale quite extensively in multiplayer, we had a pretty good foundation to build on when adding this feature. In hard mode, nearly everything has been tuned at least slightly to make enemies more of a menace.

Apart from the basic/boring buff of slightly more HP (30 % for normal enemies), they also hit harder, move faster and have less glaring weaknesses. On normal, mastering perfect guard was an optional thing. On hard, enemies will make short work of your shield without it. Here’s a couple of examples to illustrate how the game changes quite a bit:

Exhibit A: Halloweeds have always been a terror on the battlefield, but at least you used to run faster than they could dig. Now if you turn your back on them, they will chase you down (and kill you). They also have half as long delay between attacks.

Exhibit B: Giga Slime (both versions) jumps quicker, the slow effect when stepping in his slime trails is twice as strong, the slow slime doesn’t disappear, he can use his hammer more frequently and its startup has been heavily reduced.

For now, personal satisfaction is the only reason to play on hard. It’s for the players that tend to get bored unless they must remain focused at all times to escape death.

Vilya has been busy creating the illustrations for all our enemy cards! Here’s previews of the Bloomo Card and the Scarecrow Card:

Fred has set up his computer for streaming, and last Friday he took it out for a spin!

Here’s a VOD of his legendary first stream, and below is the result from when he was sketching enemies for the Flying Temple:

Fred will announce on Twitter and Facebook when any future streams go live, so keep an eye out for the continuation of his streaming/DJ career!

Greenlight

First and foremost, thanks to all of you who voted on us over at our Steam Greenlight page. Thanks to all of you, we just got Secrets of Grindea greenlit and ready to be on Steam as soon as it’s finished!

This week it’s finally been time for us to build a new area! It’s a somewhat traditional forest-y area which houses one new enemy, the bowman’s house and a mysterious mansion…

While it’s not in the game yet (soon!), here’s a WIP preview of what it’ll look like:

Yes, as you might guess that means it’s soon time for the bow to reappear in the game! It won’t have its own skill tree like the traditional weapons, but we hope you’ll like it none the less. We’ll talk more about the bow once it’s actually implemented along with the rest of this area.

As for the new enemy, it’s of course the boar that has made an appearance on this blog before! This time, however, it’s animated – and out to get you!

Can you name the Ragnarok Online inspiration? ;)

Now, back to area-building! With some luck, there might be yet another area available soon after this one.. :>

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

Big thanks to all the people taking part in the beta! An extra shout out to all the guys and gals who took the time to write up feedback for us. It means a ton to us and will really help us make the game as good as it can be.

To all of you who have signed up for the beta but haven’t got the chance to play it yet, hang in there! We will be sending out a batch of new invites when we are ready with a new update for the game. We are working hard on some new features that are in the need of testing, hopefully it will be worth the wait!

Production

As for the production this week, we have done some changes to the Collectors Exam the players must pass during the early parts of the game in order to become a Collector. For those of you who doesn’t know, the exam is divided into a three part trial. Initially the three parts were treasure hunting, puzzling as well as a juicy combat part.

After some feedback and a lot of talking and discussion within the team we decided to change the treasure hunting into a fishing event instead. The main reason for the change was that the fishing system is used much more frequently through out the game, so it made more sense making it a part of the trials. It also streamlined the introduction of the fishing much more for us, something that we have been having headaches over for a while.

The fishing even in action!

Besides reworking and touching up old things, we have made some new progress.  We have started working on a new boss! Two actually, as they are a pair of demon twins. They are an optional encounter, but we are putting just as much love and care into them as the main bosses.

We’ll not dive into detail into the mechanics of how they work since they are still in the prototype stage, so you’ll have to do with some eye candy and the promise of fierce boss battle once it all comes together.

From early design sketches to finished sprites!

And some freshly baked animations!