Guys! I am afraid this weekly recap will be incredibly empty, which is a shame seeing as this is our 300th week of blogging about the creation of Secrets of Grindea!! :( However, I’ve actually been destroyed by a nasty flu from hell that decided to take a turn for the worse over 2½ weeks in (hello fever), meaning I haven’t been able to work or blog any during this week. To make matters worse, I brought Teddy down with me, so the only one well enough to do anything aside from sleep and cough this week has been Fred (hopefully he manages to escape the nasty clutches of this evil flu)!

BUT, we do have some news about our company!

As you may or may not know, for these last four years or so, we’ve had our office in a spare room (the guest room) in our apartment. It’s been pretty nice having your workspace so close, but it has also had its own challenges, such as being easily distracted by the pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen when you should be working, or simply not knowing where work ends and where free time begins (hint: it never really ends when you technically live in the office).

Last time we went to a semi-regular After Work event for the game design industry here on the island, we heard there were office spaces available where some of the other companies work, and the more we thought about it, the more we realized we might actually benefit from having a small office outside of our home. This way we’d be able to keep work and free time more separate, hopefully making each more focused, while actually getting outside more (enforced 2×10 minute walks through a world heritage city filled with ruins and amazing architecture to get to the office and back, sounds good to me) compared to leaving the apartment twice per week for groceries.

So two weeks ago we went to check on one of the spaces, and we kind of fell in love! It’s on the third floor, rather small (making it cheap!) but not much smaller than the space we’re currently in. It honestly didn’t take much thought before we decided to go for it!

It’ll be available to us from the 1st of December, so expect some exciting posts as we move into our new office and make it ours. I don’t have any pictures of it right now, but I’ll make sure to take plenty once we’re actually moving in. Unfortunately, this is all I have for this week, but next should be a regular recap with lots of juicy stuff! Stay tuned and have a great week until then :)

This week it’s time to move on to doing some interiors for the Tai Ming arcade floors! Since Tai Ming is a town, it would be kind of weird to not have any houses you can go into, so we decided to make a few variations!

First up, deciding on the sizes (paying extra attention to the user interface limitations this time):

Starting off with the wider of the rooms, I add some basic walls and floors to create a shell we can use to decorate these interiors in various ways:

First up this entails wall decorations! For this shape, we have three variations of what the walls can look like:

…and they in turn can be combined with three different floor layouts:

Using these six types of decorations, we can mix and mach and create quite different rooms, even though the shape is the same! As you can see, we also added another type of floor texture to mix things up even more:

And then, it’s just doing the same thing all over again, but with the smaller version of the room:

Now it’s time to make a bunch of rooms that go in the other direction (horizontally)! Starting off in the same way, deciding on size and adding the basics:

Then adding a bunch of wall and floor decorations:

And here are some mix and match examples of what these houses can look like:

While there isn’t a ton of variation, there also won’t be a lot of house interiors, and even if there were we think it’s probably not going to look too much the same (especially when you compare it to previous floors, which were all very basic and same-looking)!

As for the final part of interior creation for these floors, there’s of course turning everything into its present version, ruined and forgotten!

Some of you may remember a discussion we had about whether the player would pass through the same rooms, once in past and once in present, or whether enforced time warps between rooms would determine whether the next room is past or present (and as such only available in that state).

Back then we were more into the idea of reusing the same rooms and showcasing them in both past and present, but since then we’ve realized that having the rooms isolated in either a past or present state is more time efficient, and in the end, may be more straight forward for the player as well. In the earlier version it would mean there are two states of the map at the same time, with different room types in them (challenge rooms and the nurse, for instance, would only be available in one of the states and you’d have to travel back and forth if you wanted to return to them after changing time).

So, with that decision, it opened up the opportunity to make even more layouts for the present type rooms, allowing for even more variation!

Here’s some of the wall and floor decorations:

And here’s a bunch of mix and matching, showing all types of rooms:

One step closer to finishing these arcade floors, wohoo! :)

And now, moving on to boss rooms! Each of our bosses are in rather special places, so instead of just sticking them into random rooms, we decided to edit and adjust the areas they are in to fit the Arcade version instead.

Starting with the Mimic, it’s pretty isolated in it’s own room, so technically we could just have had it appear inside a random interior. However, since we want to show off that the Mimic is coming (in more ways than simply having the skull map indicator for those who are looking), we decided to bring in the entrance to his lair from the game:

Of course, a few adjustments were needed. For one, we didn’t want to use the whole map, so we extracted the building part, removed the door, and added ropes to keep you from going up the stairs:

Trying it out in photoshop, it doesn’t look too shabby when you connect it to the stone fence:

We also added some specific decorations for when this room appears, so that nothing will get cut off:

As for the Thorn Worm boss, its arena is pretty set in the middle of town:

…But we extracted the whole building and made it a map of its own, removing all the distracting surroundings and fixing things that got broken in the move. Here, too, we added a bunch of decorations surrounding the battlefield, and you’ll be able to exit to the next floor by going through the big door:

As for the third boss, the Priestess…

…we use pretty much the same method! Extract the whole area, remove things that are unnecessary to the fight and fix any things that need fixing. In this case there was no version of the building with an open door, and since we want the player to progress into the next floor through its interior, I had to repaint the area surrounding the door to make it open:

Now we just need to make a corridor that you will run through in either past or present state depending on which of the bosses you faced, in order to reach the next floor!

Meanwhile, there’s one more week of fishy updates, but this is the last one! With this post all the fishes have been animated and are ready to be added to the aquarium:

Now that those are out of the way, Fred can finally go back to creating NPCs for the desert, which is what we’ll be diving into as soon as we finish up our Arcade Mode business. There are still quite a backlog of portraits I’ve made over the months for random character that will live there, so he has his work cut out for him for a while!

So a really long time ago by now, we started working on the Tai Ming floors. Or rather, I made a bunch of graphics for them and awaited a chance for Teddy to add them to the game for testing. Now, a hundred years later when we finally finished a ton of other important stuff, it’s time to dive back into the actual Arcade floors again, and it begins with fixing a bunch of errors.

To start off, the first thing we noticed when adding things to the engine was that I had somehow failed making the openings in the two types of fences the same width, which creates a bunch of zoning problems….

….and secondly, all of us had completely forgotten how much space the interface takes in in Arcade Mode compared to Story Mode. If you take a look at the screen below, you can see a lot of the fighting area is covered by the map and score board:

Not exactly ideal… SO, two kind of major things for me to fix: one, make sure the fence openings are equally wide, and make the fight areas smaller so they won’t get covered by interface (we certainly don’t want anyone losing precious score because an enemy was hiding behind the map):

The above changes may not look like much but it makes all the difference in the engine! As you may notice, the exits are no longer in the middle of the fence, but further towards the top. This is to save Teddy a ton of work, as he had already implemented the zoning for each of this exits, and would have to manually change them after the fence resize. As such, we decided keep them slightly higher and save the work. It may not look 100% ideal but I think in the heat of battle nobody will really think much of it.

Now, here are a few more screens showing what things look like in the engine so far (using my still not fixed graphics at this point):

As you can see, there’s a lot of stuff missing still, but the core is getting there (it’s basically playable, just not polished graphically at all). Next up I’ll be making a bunch of decorations for the area around the “room”s: grass decorations, randomized trees and rocks, etc. Once everything is added I think this will actually look quite nice!

But before moving on to more Tai Ming floor stuff, I wanted to finish a rather important boss room for Mount Bloom’s arcade floors: the one where you’ll battle the Black Ferrets (the awesomest trio in the game, am I right?!)

As you may know, this battle initially takes place inside the HQ, but will now be in Mount Bloom, as it’s where you’ll be at Arcadia wise. As such, we extracted the vital points of the map (the actual size of the fight area, so Teddy does not have to make new boundaries for it):

…And the proceed to make a new version of the area, set in Mount Bloom instead!

It’s kind of amazing how much smaller the fight area looks when it’s surrounded by water rather than more of the HQ, but it’s the exact same size! Teddy and Freddy will each be on the opposite end, hurling their blades at the unsuspecting player(s), just like in story mode:

Okay, back to the Tai Ming floor decoration stuff! First up, adding a ton of floor decorations around the battle area (inside the battle area it’ll be randomized, so it won’t look so similar each time):

Now, we need to make sure the flowers won’t get cut off when we add water or mountain walls, as seen below (fixed by moving the flowers slightly away from the border):

In order to make the edges of the water look more decorated, we put a bunch of the flowers directly on its sprite:

And now, the most important stuff: making a bunch of variations for trees, rocks and other decorations that will appear around the fences when there is no water or mountain to cover ’em up. I’ve made 6 variation of each side: three for when there’s an exit in that directions, and three for when it’s closed (as seen in the two examples below):

When a horizontal fence connects with a vertical one, there also needs to be a number of corner decorations, so I made three of those for each corner as well, two of which can be seen below:

Mixing and matching these decorations along with water, mountain walls and the buildings I made earlier will surely make this area look a whole lot different each time you play it! I think as far as Arcade floors go, these will probably look the most epic in that way, as each time you get there will truly be a new experience graphics wise.

Now I just need to make a bunch of interiors (you’ll battle through buildings as well), and turn everything into its past version for when it’s time for the time warp!

As for Fred’s work this week:

Even more fishies! When all this is said and done we’ll be able to make a fishing game… Wouldn’t that be exciting?! (Maybe not…)

So while these fishes take a lot of time to complete, we hope that once they’re all available in the aquarium it’ll be worth all the effort! Plus, who knows what else we can come up with now that we have a ton of animated fishes.

If you have any ideas, feel free to share your crazy fish dreams!

This week we mainly continue our work on the Arcadia remake, but we also took some time to bring a bunch of printouts of the desert area to our favorite fast food place for a little chat! Our goal was to discuss more in detail exactly what’s going to happen as you journey through the desert towards the harbour town, and what side quests we aim to include as we add this to the game.

We took a ton of notes on each of the maps, filling them with sentences about what will happen, what things will look like, what caves will connect and what will be in them, etc. After we were done, the desert had gone from a pretty basic set of maps to one of the most well thought out areas so far, at least in my opinion!

We aim to include three bigger side quests when we add it to frontline/stable (not including quests we might come put with for the harbour town), but like most areas, we have more ideas for other quests to include at a later date when it’s time for an overall polish of the entire game. While it won’t have a big side area like the Tai Ming’s phase shift section, the main quest here will bring back a lot of old friends to the plot, and have you travel outside the desert as well.

With all this new information, there’s a ton of new maps (cave interiors, specifically) for me to do, and a few new enemy and mini-boss animations for Fred to deal with as well! It’s all gonna be a lot of fun, and we hope you’ll be as excited to finally explore this area as we are making it.

However, before we start focusing for real on the desert, there’s still something left to do: the Arcadia rework (as mentioned), including the Tai Ming and Mount Bloom floors which currently aren’t in the game. So while we’ve made sure to plan ahead for this, it’ll be a little while before we actually continue working on the desert stuff.

And the next Arcade Mode interior…. is the Inn! Or the tavern! Whatever you wish to call it. True, it does not have beds, but who’s to say there isn’t a hidden door somewhere that leads upstairs?

In either case, this is sort of an upgraded version of the old Tavern in Arcadia. Doesn’t look exactly the same, but I went for the same sort of feel and the overall layout. When everything is implemented this place will probably have more visitors than it currently does, more inhabitants looking to hand out quests!

Here’s the WIP video, using a lot of old housing items for this one:

And the finished version:

Next up, the arena!! Another interior that gets and upgrade, where we aren’t completely decided on whether this new upgraded version will replace the old one in Story Mode.

Like with the farm, I kind of went for the same layout and overall design, though in the original version there are statues of fighters which I opted out of in this version: I just didn’t feel it worked very well with this rather smaller and more compact version of the layout.

Instead, my hope is to have a few spectators chat in the reception area, maybe swooning at the champions (you guys) who are about to enter the fray!

Here’s the WIP video:

And the finished version:

And now, a completely new building, not previously available in any form: the Bank! How exciting! …Maybe.

So for this place we wanted the look of a waiting room, with a kind of office-y feel to it. People requesting loans and whatnot will be waiting for their turn, while the player can just waltz up to one of the desks and request an exchange of gold to essence (or the other way around)!

Aside from the desk where the bank workers will be, there’s a (heavily guarded!) vault, and a water cooler, cause waiting times for non-players can be quite extreme…

The WIP video:

Finished version:

And finally, a bunch of new fishes for the Aquarium, to end this week!

After some discussion we’ve decided to make all of the fishes available in the Aquarium, which means each of them needs to be animated. While Fred has made a bunch already, there’s still a ton left to do…

..and as such, here’s the second fish batch, ready to be put into an aquarium near you: