Not much to say about this week’s post, except that we’re still working on the Halloween Forest! This week, Vilya has been working on some sweet set pieces, while Fred soldiers on with the many animations. Without further ado, let’s dive right into the pixels!

This here is the house of a candy cooking witch! Somewhere down the line, she must’ve realized candy was better for business than potions. Don’t eat her walls though; she won’t like that…

Here’s an old shrine in a small graveyard, tied to the ancient religion of the world.

On the animation side of things the scarecrow has sprung to life, ready to cause trouble for any collectors traveling through the Halloween Forest!

Next Week: You couldn’t guess: more halloween stuff!

As promised, we’ve been crunching away with the Halloween Forest this week! We’ve got the basic color scheme and props down, as well as nearly all of the enemies that will inhabit the region.

Apart from this screen, we’ve iterated the whole forest layout to something we feel pretty confident will work out, so what’s left now props wise is mostly bigger set pieces, like the witch’s cottage, and putting everything together in a nice way!

 

Here’s the enemy lineup Fred’s been working on

And below are idle animations for a couple of them!

• The pumpkin will be a cannonfodder-type enemy, which means there will be quite a lot of them, and they are pretty straightforward to defeat (but certainly more deadly than slimes and rabbits)
• The flying jack o’ lantern is a ranged type, and fires small projectiles at the players. He also scales with the number of players, shooting more projectiles if there are many players. His flames can be blocked with a shield, or even reflected if timed properly!
• The scarecrow is a tanky, melee type that can withstand several hits before going into hitstun. Using the shield to find openings is a dominant strategy here.
• Finally, the ghost is a harass type enemy, which stays invisible until it is in position for an attack. It appears as it charges, so you have some time to react, but will fade away again soon after the attack is finished. You’ll want to dispose of these buggers as soon as you see them! They are trickster ghosts of sorts, waiting around for unwary travelers to play with.

We’ll also be adding a plant enemy called Halloweed, which is an upgraded version of the flower you might’ve spotted in our videos. We’re still trying to nail his color scheme though, hence his absense in the lineup! He’ll use his vines to whack players that are close to him, but unlike his less agile brother, this guy will burrow and chase you underground if you’re out of his reach for too long!

Encountering all of these enemies all at once would certainly be a daunting (and frustrating) challenge, so we’ll spread them out a bit and try to make sure the spawn compositions are varied and well balanced!

Next Week: Even more halloween stuff will see the light!

Due to an unexpected turn of events, we’ve done some redecorating in our schedule. We’ve got a golden opportunity of merging working on Grindea with schoolwork, and we felt we had to take it! The flip side was that, since it’s a project course, we needed a somewhat isolated element of the game that would take about five weeks to complete.

We’ve chosen to create a new field in the game, and as such, the stuff we had planned to do will be frozen until this course is done. It’s mostly good news, since we’ll get more done, and all of us sort of secretly wanted to work on new environments and enemies. The updates will probably be more interesting as well, for that matter! However, due to this arrangement, we’ll postpone the beta testing as well. :(

To get our minds of that dark lining of the silver cloud, here are three very anatomically correct ferrets on top of each other!

This is our logo! We’ll have to throw together some nice font that says “Pixel Ferrets” too, but this is the core! We felt it was about time to get one, being nine months into development and all.

Now back to our plans for the coming weeks:

The area we’re going to create is temporarily called the Halloween Forest, but we plan on changing the name to something a bit more fun later on! The zone is somewhat scary (as you probably figured out from the name) yet still cute. The enemies and decorations will include things such as pumpkins, lanterns, candle lights, scarecrows, ghosts, mist and spooky trees. This is the home of the odd Candy Witch, a couple of wicked twins and a mysterious hooded man. It’s also here you will have the chance of helping a lonely scarecrow in a quest!

This is one of our favourite areas (at least to talk about) so we’re looking forward to a few entertaining weeks for all of us. We hope you’ll will like it as much as we do!

In-between all the planning of our new schedules and preparation for the new course, Fred has kick started operation Halloween Forest with its very first inhabitant, a little jumpin’ pumpkin!

There’s plenty more enemies to come during the following weeks; we have a total of five planned for this area.

Next Week: Enemies! Trees! Stuff! Halloween!

Another week has rushed past, and the battle with the GUI continues! We’re pretty much wrapping up the main menu, and are moving on to in-game stuff. Due to our passionate and undying love for interface work, we also decided to redesign how keyboard vs. controller works in the game.

But let’s get the main menu out of the way, first!

This here is the multiplayer lobby! Players can gather there before starting a game, and adjust a couple of multiplayer settings. Of course, if you don’t like waiting for that dude who’s just gonna “grab a sandwich or something”, you can start the game and have your friends connect to you while you’re playing!

The first option you have is Item Share. It can be set to either Each Take, where all items go to whatever player that picks them up, or Round Robin, which distributes items fairly and randomly.

Secondly we have Mentorship, which if turned on will synchronize the combat efficiency of all characters to roughly the same level as the lowest leveled character. This is useful for players who want to play together, but haven’t gotten equally far into the game. Instead of having to start over from the beginning, they can play from where the lower leveled player is in the story without the higher leveled one wreaking havoc and potentially ruin the experience for his friend.

That sums up the lobby pretty well, so let’s head on to the HUD-changes by showing two screens of the different setups:

It’s been a long time coming, but we finally decided to completely separate the control schemes for keyboard and gamepads. Up until now, we’ve had emulator-like controls on the keyboard, which worked sort of well, but certainly not as well as it could. This meet-halway-there approach limited our options with the controller as well, so this was the right thing to do.

The new keyboard HUD looks and works similar to modern RPGs and MMOs, where you have a bar with abilities which you activate with hotkeys (which you can bind however you want — in the picture I’ve used keys close to those I use for the sword and shield). You can have up to ten quickslots set at a time, and a quickslot can contain either a skill, a consumable item or a weapon.

The gamepad HUD looks like it used to, and also has ten quickslots. The first two can be used by just pressing a button, and two sets of four more quickslots can be accessed by holding the left or the right trigger before pressing the button. We might do a video of this later to show it in action.

Luckily, it’s not all GUIs in ferretland. Fred has spent some time making a few cool, new weapons for players to use!

Next Week: Even moar GUI-work! Woohoo! Fred will be making the rest of the animations for our new weapons

Hello and happy valentines day to everyone (one day early, but hey)!
Sadly(?), today’s update does not have a lot to do with romance. Instead, we focus on character creation, since it has been our main focus this week!

The week started off with Vilya creating and later adjusting haircuts together with Fred. A few mishaps later they ended up spending almost three entire days (not even kidding) adjusting clothing colors. Imagine how tired they are of that by now!

In the end everything turned our quite well though! We currently have 30 different clothing colors (per item) to pick from and 8 different haircuts per gender. There will be more as we move on though, so fear not! Hopefully you will all have a favorite style before we’re done with the game ;3

Anyway, there really isn’t much more to say. Instead, have a look at this video with commentary by Fred, which shows everything you need to know about the character creation:

Other than that, a lot of you guys asked us about the beta last week and how to get into it. Because we wanna start off small, we’ll begin with inviting people we know and have worked with previously. After that, we’ll expand more and include people from outside our circles. When the time is near we’ll let you know of a way to sign up, don’t worry!

Next week: We remake the GUI for keyboard users and add more skills!

Used to Monday updates yet?! You better be, ’cause here’s another!

For Vilya, this week started off with the return to Pillar Mountains (one of the first areas of the game). We decided that we wanted the mountains to look a little different from the ground levels, so she made new trees (birches!) and huge rocks to fill out the open areas (just like the bushes from the previous post do on the ground level).

Here is a screen of the result:

After this it was time to return to one of our (least) favorite subjects: Menu systems! Because it’s almost time for the first people to try the game out, we thought cleaning up and actually creating a main menu would be a good idea.

This is what it looks like at the moment:

The clouds pass by in the background, and in the future (when Fred has some space in his schedule) we plan on adding birds flying by as well. As for now, only the main screen and character select sections are in place, so our work on this continues this week with character creation, multiplayer hosting and the like!

Freds major task this week has been working out sprites and animations for our multiplayer death/resurrect system. The main focus was on this little ghost fellow, which is what you turn into if you die during a co-op session.

Once you die you can move around freely and while you can’t engage in combat, you can use some sweet ghost exclusive emotes and flavour animations to cheer on your surviving pals! It’s up to them to resurrect you, which can be somewhat hectic if you’re in the middle of an epic boss fight. If all players die and turns into ghosts, it’s game over and you will have to restart from the latest check point!

On a closing note, we’ve submitted the game to the Swedish Game Awards, which is a nation wide student competition here in Sweden. Wish us luck!

Next Week: Menus, menus, skills and more menus!

Hello again and welcome to another weekly recap!

But wait, you say, it’s not Friday today… No, indeed, here in Sweden it’s currently Monday evening, and as we already mentioned over at Facebook and Google+ last week (sadly, we forgot about Twitter..), we are rescheduling our future updates to Mondays from now on.

The reason is simply that we have changed our workflow and made stricter schedules for each of us, listing the tasks we need to do each week. Since we all enjoy working on the game during the weekends we also thought Mondays would be a better time to show the progress. That way we can show the tasks we finished during our scheduled week, including the things we saved for the weekend!

Anyway, let’s forget about that now and focus on what’s important: the update!

This week, Vilya spent making another zone, the east outskirts of the city. There’s a mysterious pond, a river and a house you won’t reach just yet.. ;3

To make the environment look better, and to avoid people getting hidden behind trees too often, we decided to create bushes to scatter around the areas. These will replace most of the random trees standing in the middle of any area so you won’t get caught by a naughty enemy hiding behind them.

Fred has been really busy this week. So busy, that he managed to complete all the tasks for next week, this week! Wooho!
Walk animations for a bunch of different NPCs was one of the tasks this week, so here’s a few of them in action paired together with some updated portraits by Vilya!

Writing and reading dialogues in XML-format was becoming quite impractical, especially for the artists. When the implementation workload let up a bit, Teddy whipped up a simple tool that made the process much less painful! The tool is made in good old C#/Winforms.

Next week: Being dead and waiting for revival in a multiplayer game is no fun. We’ll look into ways of making death (or being dead) a bit less boring!

Another week rushes by!

This week we (especially Fred) spent a lot of time spicing up the combat by adding new and improved effects to just about everything! To show you what it looks like, we prepared a video with commentary from our animator himself, Fred:

In the meanwhile, Vilya has spent her days reworking the dirt tiles from last week, fiddling around with the background layers of our mountain area – people requested blur, and we’ll try it out!

She has also been improving on the portraits a bit more, and yet another sneak peek is available here (click to view full size):

Who is that rude fellow?! He will be one of the frequently recurring characters of Grindea, but you’ll have to play the game to find out more than that! ;)

-Surprise Limerick*–

If when playing you play with ambition
there will most likely be repetition,
and while I don’t mind
some old fashioned grind,
I love to have fun on my mission!

[*Pixel Ferrets does not guarantee that it is, in fact, a limerick. While the visuals are sweet in general, the combat was missing some sort of flair! To rectify this horrible injustice, Teddy joined Fred in a glorious, effect filled crusade!]

Next week: We start working on a new zone and bringing the game’s first act together!

This week we have continued to refine and change small parts of the city. There’s always things to change for the better, so it’s quite easy to keep busy that way..

One of the many touch ups Vilya has been working with this week is giving the old dirt roads a face lift! Shout out to the guys over at the TIGsource forums for their great feedback and keeping us motivated!

Anyway, we continue on, this time showing you another screen (an animated one on top of that!) of another part of Evergrind City:

(Click the image to watch it in full size and animated!)

Fred keeps filling the city with NPCs and animations, to help Evergrind come to life! Some of the stuff he did this week can be seen in the screenshot above.

There’s still a ton of NPCs and other animations to go before Evergrind is even close to finished, so stay for more of the same the coming weeks!

Also, as promised, below is the song that’s playing in Evergrind City! It’s written by Andrew Riley of Luckylionstudios.com, who’s composing the entire soundtrack for us!

[audio:https://www.secretsofgrindea.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Andrew-Riley-Secrets-of-Grindea-OST-Evergrind-City.mp3|titles=Andrew Riley – Secrets of Grindea OST – Evergrind City]

Author’s comment: “I wanted to write an upbeat, fun song, with a certain sentimentality that would come with spending time in the city with your friends. I hope you enjoy it and thanks for listening!“

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Formed by pixly gods
Brought to life through wizard’s writ
Art of crafting games”

[Teddy has mostly been busy with his favourite part of the job: implementing the tidal wave of stuff created by the artists!]

Next week: We venture indoors in Evergrind and we take a shot at spicing up the combat!

We’re back! The holidays were great and we all got some time together with our friends and family, but we also managed to squeeze in some work. Here’s what we’ve been doing lately:

Vilya has been putting together the major city of the game: Evergrind City. The outside areas are almost completely done and the only thing missing is creating what will be inside the houses. Quite some work, of course, but we’re well under way! Here’s a screen from the city, more to come next week:

Fred has had his hands busy with three things: skills, NPCs, and being sick once again.

Here’s the Ice Nova skill in action. Close ranged AoE at its best! The added chance to freeze your enemies is a pretty sweet bonus.

And here we have one of the many NPCs living in Evergrind. The Blacksmith! Besides having one of the finest beards in all of Grindea, this fellow will help the players along their quest by forging some of the sweetest gear you can get your hands on!

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Skills to pay the bills
Sharpened blades and crippling cold
Winter is coming”

[In the programming department, most time has been spent on getting Fred’s skill animations into the game and working, as well as making them look as good as possible!]

Next week: More Evergrind goodness, plus a special treat for your ears!