It’s been a while since release and it’s time to get back to the office after a short break! I have to say it still feels pretty surreal that Secrets of Grindea has finally been released – although the development will continue on for quite a while.

In this first ‘real’ update since the release, I thought I’d share with you what our plans are for the game in the near future:

Rebalance

One of our prioritites going forward will definitely be to take a look at the overall balance, especially late-game. We’ve already made some decisions in regards to this, such as:

* Giving the Evil Eye’s laser and barrage a slightly longer delay, which should give players a bit more time to position themselves accordingly.

* Giving Luke’s explosion sprites smaller colliders, which means you can be closer to them without taking damage.

* Giving Luke’s whirlwind spin-across-the-screen an improved indicator, which should make avoiding it easier.

* Keeping the Furious (Red) Giga Slime at the same level it was when the player first encountered it, rather than having its difficulty scale with the player’s level.

* Adding “clarity options”, making it possible to hide pets and summons belonging to other players.

* Finding some way(s) of pointing players to the support skills when needed.

* Not having to complete all of the more difficult phase shift challenges in Mount Bloom in order to get the true ending.

New Game +

We do know that we want a New Game+ mode. What that entails exactly we haven’t decided exactly yet, but our idea so far is that:

* You’ll keep your character and all of your gear and loot.

* You’ll be able to collect every card again, increasing their stats and bonuses.

* You’ll need to have gotten true ending to unlock New Game + by talking to a character (probably Bishop).

Other Game Modes

Along with New Game + we intend to release two new difficulties: Chill Mode and Hardcore Mode. Chill mode will be the equivalent of an Easy Mode, for those who would like to enjoy the story without the hassle of too challenging gameplay, while Hardcore Mode challenges you to finish the game with only one life – when you die you die.

Misc

Other than that, we’re also looking at:

* A new options for full screen resolutions, where black borders will make sure the pixels remain intact instead of getting too mushy.

* Making it possible to easily swap between a quick-slotted weapon and your previously equipped weapon.

* The option to bind a potion slot to a separate button, instead of having to use your “potion-belt”.

* A prompt that will let you copy a previous multiplayer session’s world state rather than having to go through every quest separately when you enter your world in single player.

* giving translators a top credit spot and the option to add their own credits at the start of the game

What About Console Ports?

This is something we’d like to do, but we’re not yet certain exactly how much work it would entail. We’re gonna look into it and make a decision in the near future.

The Blog Update Frequency

As the game has been released and a lot of our work going forward will be balancing and things that don’t generate too much visual output, the blog updates will go from being posted once a week to once a month.

That means that the next blog post will be available on May 1st, and at that point you’ll get another recap on what we’ve been working on since last time. Until then, have a good April! :D

First of all, I want to thank every single one of you for your messages in response to the release date and release trailer. I don’t have the proper words to explain how touched we are by your overwhelming support, your kind words, and the wonderful stories of how you came to find our game many years ago, and who you’ve played it with.

Thank you for sharing your stories and for supporting us through this adventure. Thank you, thank you, thank you ❤️

Now, this is the final week of development before the release. What that means is pretty much that Teddy has been fixing bugs while I’ve been sending out mails to the streamers, youtubers and press we would love to see play the game.

Fred finished up the trailer last week and has since then been working on another small video we hope to share on release.

There’s also been some minor graphic details I’ve needed to take care of, but for the most part we won’t make any bigger changes to the actual game before release now.

Speaking of the actual release, it will begin at 7PM CET (10AM PT) this Thursday, at which point the game will offically leave early access with a small release discount. Teddy and Fred will also host a live stream on the Steam store page around this time, so be sure to drop by! :)

Again, thank you so much for your support. This game couldn’t have been made without you guys ❤️

This weekly recap will be a little different, because very soon – unless something unexpected happens – Secrets of Grindea will be fully released on Steam, GOG and Humble Bundle. That means most of our efforts have been going into working on store page assets, recording and editing stuff for the trailer, ironing out bugs and adding the final bunch of stuff before the release.

The End of Snowbacca Tiers

It also means the Snowbacca Tiers will close on Monday the 26th – that is, in exactly one week, in preparation for the release. We’re incredibly thankful for everyone who has (and will yet) support us by purchasing this tier, but it’s time to wrap it up. That means this is the final chance to be added to the credits and get your hands on the digital production booklet (which will be available some time after the release).

What’s Next?

While the game will soon enter 1.0 and be fully released, we’ll continue adding some further improvements in post-release updates. However, our hopes are that most of these will be quality of life and visual upgrades that won’t affect the overall experience too much. Obviously we’ll also keep cleaning up bugs that get reported, and we do have a dream of adding New Game+ or some such in the future, although we’ll give you more details on that when things have settled down a little bit.

More information on the upcoming release will be available very soon. Thank you all so much for your continued support – we’d never have been able to do this without you!

This week, the release preparations continue! We’ve been making backgrounds and trading cards for the Steam release (along with a bunch of other promotional work, which we’ll keep working on in the weeks to come):

(Just as a precaution, note that the game is not released yet, the above is just a mockup of some promotional material we’ve been working on)

With most of the art for the initial release done, Vilya will continue working on the promotional side of things – preparing a ton of emails, doing promotional art like the ones above (animated by Fred), and working on the development booklet included with your Snowbacca Tier purchase.

Initially we wanted to have the booklet available at the release of the game itself, but we’ve decided to push back on the booklet release in order to include some perspective on how the launch actually went with everything said and done. We’ll keep you updated on when we expect that to be available, so stay tuned!

Meanwhile, Fred continues working on the trailer and Teddy keeps adding menus and bug fixes to the game. Can’t believe we’re almost there! :)

With the release very close at hand, we’ve continued to finish up the last bunch of stuff! This week that means making icons for the achievements we decided on:

For the defeat Grindea achievement, we actually had a bunch of different options, but settled for the first one shown here:

Some of these achievements will be available both in-game and through Steam, and some will be hidden and on Steam only.

We also made a final(?) bunch of items:

….and started to prepare some of the Steam related things (emoticons, trading card badges and so on):

Fred, meanwhile, continues working on the trailer, which currently looks something like this:

Not quite done yet, as you can see – but we’re getting there! :)

The interface fixes continue this week with an overhaul of the pet system interfaces, which should be fully translatable once these updates are in the game!

First up the pet caught box:

The new feeding menu:

As you can see here we’re pretty much aiming to remove as many of the texts as possible, using icons to illustrate what’s going on instead!

The Pet rename interface:

…and finally the swap pet window:

The quest received and quest completed, card album updated and teleport plate notification boxes have also been updated to make sure they’re translatable and visually matching the in-game menu overhaul that’s on it’s way in as well:

We’re also recording a new trailer in anticipation of the release, which is what Fred has been working on most of this week. Stay tuned for that once it’s finished! :D

Another week and more interface fixes in preparation for the final release! These fixes are all meant to make sure the game can be fully and properly translated, but they will also ensure the menus and interfaces of the game look a lot better :)

First up, the arena and target practice interfaces:

Mostly we’ve removed the built in text and touched up the graphics slightly here.

The popup menus in the equipment section of the menu had some sizing issues we’ve taken care of, which meant the icons had to be edited to a new size (and some remade more or less completely):

We’ve also remade the skill info and skill upgrade sections to make sure there’s enough room for translated text and fonts used by different writing systems:

Finally, Fred has been adding some post-endgame sprites for some of the NPCs found around Grindea, as things settle down after you’ve saved the world :)

We’re baaaack in the office and things are moving pretty quickly!

First of all there’s a lot of meetings to be had regarding what final things we’ll add before 1.0 – deciding which sound effects we still need to order, finalizing the achievements list and making the appropriate graphics, figuring out what steam assets we need and deciding on how to correct some things that aren’t compatible with the translation suite.

One such translation issue we’ve had has been the in-game menu headers, which Vilya made textless versions of last week, allowing them to be translated in a future update:

Another thing we’ve been working on has been adding the final Pet skins – so far some slots have been locked, but as of the next update every pet will have 6 different skins! Here’s a bunch of the new ones:

Meanwhile, Teddy continues to implement our fixes and additions, meaning all the new haircuts will be in the game next update, along with a ton of smaller improvements and bug fixes. Stay tuned! :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS everyone!

We’re just dropping in to wish you all a merry christmas and let you know that a new patch is out on frontline as of last week! The patch notes can be accessed here, but in short it allows you to play all three endings: one for Arcade Mode and two for Story Mode.

With this patch out of the way, we’re going to go home to visit some family and try to relax for a bit before we get back to preparing for the actual release of this game. We’ll be back in the office on the 8th of January, which means the next blog post will be available on the 15th. In the meanwhile, please enjoy the latest patch and let us hear all of your feedback :)

Again, we wish you all a merry christmas and a happy new patch year!

 

-“Hey everyone!! Vilya caught a cold this weekend, so to cover for her the side-kick-team has assembled to present this week’s blog post!”

-“We’re very grateful to Pixel Ferrets for trusting us with this great and noble responsibility!”

– “…”

-“Anyway, let’s dive straight into it! First, let’s have a look at this amazing picture of… of…”

-“Oh my GODDESS!! It’s gonna be spring in Santa Fae?!!”

-“…how can you not know these things?”

-“Wow, it looks truly beautiful! Great news, indeed! I wonder if that poor, frozen fellow has thawed yet?”

-“Only one way to find out.”

-“I can’t believe Santa Fae got a makeover… and in my season, too! I’m so happy!”

-“Alright. Moving on:”

-“Wow. Amazing. Moving clouds.”

-“I must say that they really add some nice depth to the scene!”

-“…ah, it’s gonna be spring in my little cozy fairytale town…”

-“Er… well, let’s have a look at a whole new place now:”

-“The Collector HQ cafeteria has finally opened! I wonder who we’ll find in there?”

-“Spoiler alert: no-one new.”

-“There are other exciting things than new faces, you know! Having a few close friends can be better than having many shallow relationships.”

-“Yeah! And speaking of good friends, take a look at this power-couple!”

-“…are these guys even Collectors at this point? All I ever see them do is clean up.”

-“Taking care of our surroundings is a noble task!”

-“…is no-one going to compliment me on my great segway about friends?”

-“No. And it’s called a segue.”

-“…wait, really?!”

-“…really?!”

-“Really. And finally, here are some more stuff Fred has scribbled together:”

-“Okay, that’s enough for today. Let’s round off this madness by mentioning that tomorrow (Tuesday), or the day after, apparently the Ferrets are hoping to release the latest version on the Frontline beta branch. Will they make a deadline for once? Stay tuned to find out!”

-“Of course they will! Stop being a negative nancy!”

-“I agree with Naniva on this one! From what I can tell, it is looking remarkably likely to play out as they plan!”

-“Well folks, Team Wholesome has weighed in on the matter, and with that we bid you all farewell and wish you a decent week.”

-“No, we wish them an amazing week!”

-“A fantastically splendid week, in fact!”

-“A sparkling, magical miracle of a week!”

-“A week of such unimaginable fortune and bliss that conveying it in text is nigh impossible!”

-“…”