This week we just want to wish you all a merry Christmas, as we’re taking a few days off to spend with our loved ones! Happy Holidays everyone, thanks for following us and see you next week!

Another week, another update! We’re now halfway through December and everyone is counting the days left before christmas. Here at the Secrets of Grindea office we keep pressing on while dreaming of the traditional swedish christmas cuisine.. :3

This week Vilya made even more portraits! She also revised some of them, and revisions will keep being made throught the entire production. Here’s an example of changes being made on the go, as well as a few of the new faces:

Better? We think so!

She also started making a few props that will appear inside one of the buildings in town. A few weapon stands, for example:

Besides adding some new stuff to the super secret first boss, Fred has been swinging away at some new skills and NPC sprites!

This here is one of the early skills from the one handed weapons skill tree (we have 8 trees in total). We haven’t got a proper name for it yet, but it plunges the hero forward damaging anything in it’s path. Range and damage increases by leveling it up.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Treasures, puzzles, fight!
Only the best are chosen.
Are you strong enough?”

[Teddy has mostly been laying the foundations for the spectacular trials! For the puzzle part, a few more puzzles were created to ease new players into it!]

Next Week: Merry Christmas!

This week Vilya spent doing no less than 29 portraits for different NPCs! Some of them you’ll see below – who do you think they are?

She also made these market stands where you’ll be able to get a variety of special items! The character sprites were made by Fred afterwards – can you pair them up with the correct face above?

Fred has been battling a vicious cold and has been out of action for a big chunk of the week :C

Besides doing the market NPCs above, he has been able to squeeze in most of the animations needed for our treasure system! We’ll post a video about it once we got it all set up, in the mean time you will have to settle for some animations off the main character digging up some treasure.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Sounds of moving earth.
Ancient ink will guide your steps.
Let the hunt begin!”

[A basic sound system is in place, as well as a system for finding maps which leads to buried treasures to use that slick digging animation on!]

Next Week: The portraits start getting matching NPC-sprites and Vilya visits her parents! Teddy takes on the trial of setting up the trials!

This week Vilya worked on the arena which now is in waiting-mode while Fred takes care of the next step! It is almost done, but need some tweaking and of course an excited crowd to watch your trials.

While waiting, she spent her time making portrait for a cutscene involving the first mini-boss battle, a mean bandit leader and her two thugs.

Next thing she went on doing was small props to be placed all around the city. Many more to come, of course:

Fred has spent some time adding a few flavor animations to the bandit gang, this here showing one of the thugs cheering on as the leader fights the player/players!

But mostly he has been busy with bringing the first boss to life! Even though being sick (damn you Vilya!) he has been able to finish up most of the animations, with just a couple left to clean up!

We don’t want to spoil all the fun by revealing too much about the bosses yet, so you guys will have to settle with this for now! Who’s that pokemon!?

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“Written destiny,
even Escape brings same end:
The Wobbling Giant.”

[I have made some in-game cutscenes, and also implemented the first ‘real’ boss. Of course, unlike in some games (looking at you Tales of Vesperia), you can press escape during a cutscene to skip it!]

Next week: The city keeps growing and the first NPCs moves in! Also, treasure hunting (for real this time!)

This week has been a little bit all over the place! We have had about a hundred subjects to discuss and plan as a result of soon having to implement the city and all that comes with it.

In short we have designed a fishing mini-game and treasure map system, made a mockup of the arena, sent out descriptions for the next batch of songs we need, made concepts of the first real boss character and finally continued on the various things we left unfinished last week.

We also made some changes in the planning of what stuff to make first, but that is hardly interesting enough to be talking about: instead, let’s take a look at what our group members have been focusing on outside of these discussions.

In the animation department, Fred has continued working on the female bandit leader. So far she’s weighing in at around 20 animations with just one or two left before she’s all done! Here’s another sneak peek of her and her madness:

We know we mentioned NPCs last time, but as a result of changing things and priorities around a bit we’re afraid they will have to wait until after we’re done with the next big thing: the arena!

In the city building district Vilya finished off the houses, all of which are now more or less ready for implementation. Here’s a preview of three of the stores that will be featured in the shopping district:

Can you guess what they are? The purple one is the hat shop, the brown is a smithy and armory, the green is, of course, the alchemist’s potion shop.

-Weekly Programming Haiku-

“A black clad demon,
raging death in human form,
tamed by tester’s tears.”

(The boss is in the game. She was too difficult at first, but now she’s nicer)

Next Time: The arena takes shape and we go treasure hunting!

A big hug to everyone who’s subscribed to us on Facebook, Twitter and other places! Having people show interest in what you’re doing is a great morale boost.

Let’s celebrate with a recap of the past week!

Fred has made some sweet animations for our first miniboss: a familiar looking, female bandit leader! She’s no behemoth but she might still prove a challenge to the inexperienced adventurer.

Meanwhile, Vilya has started building houses for the main city while battling a terrible cold. The buildings below are common residencies – the shops and other special houses will have huge signs on the roof implying what use they have.

Here’s the sketch she used as reference:

And here’s the end result (still to be tweaked):

The city is going to be fairly big, featuring about 15 buildings (including a smithy, an alchemist store, a hat store, a café and more), a market and the grand Colosseum!

In the coding department, a recoloring shader was made to make the creation of new clothing colors easier. First, a tool turns every spritesheet into a Na’vi, and in-game the shader will recolor it.

This makes it possible to change the colors of individual pieces of clothing separately on the fly, without any additional asset loading.

Next time: The miniboss will be put into the game, and the citybuilding will continue! Maybe we’ll see some NPCs?!

Hello and welcome! This is Secrets of Grindea’s brand new devblog. Here the progress we make will be recorded as the game makes its way to release. As you may have seen or read already, Secrets of Grindea is a 4 player co-op RPG in pixel graphics meant as a tribute (and perhaps parody) of the old SNES games, but with modern features (see the main page for more information).

After this update we’ll try to make a new post every Friday with a list of what we have made and how things are progressing in general with the game. We’ll also include a forecast of what’s next to be done! If you have any questions or comments, please leave a comment below or contact us through one of the communitites: Facebook, Twitter or Google+ :)

(Also, in case you didn’t see it already, we recorded a video of the co-op in our latest area here.)

Next Time: Graphically creating the next area, making a recoloring shader, the first boss?!